Introduction

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was and continues to be arguably the most admired human being of the twentieth century in India and throughout the world. Polls invariably rank Gandhi at or near the top of the most admired, along with Albert Einstein and a few others. M. K. Gandhi is better known as Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) Gandhi, the honorific title usually believed to have been conferred upon him and certainly popularized by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore.1 In India he was frequently given the honorific title Bapu (‘Father’), and he is honoured in India as the Father of the Nation. His birthday, 2 October, is celebrated in India as Gandhi Jayanti, a national holiday. After the United Nations General Assembly vote of 15 June 2007, his birthday is celebrated worldwide as the ‘International Day of Non-Violence’.

Remarkably, Mahatma Gandhi was and continues to be admired by a range and diversity of people. Such admiration was expressed by millions of illiterate peasants, who identified with and often worshipped and even deified him. Of the Indian leaders in the Freedom Movement, he alone was able to capture the imagination, love and trust of the impoverished peasants and to inspire them to transform their values and commitments. As Tagore observed: ‘Mahatma Gandhi came and stood at the door of India’s destitute millions, clad as one of themselves, speaking to them in their own language . . . who else has so unreservedly accepted the vast masses of the Indian people as his flesh and blood . . . Truth Awakened Truth.’

Such admiration was also expressed by many of the best-known cultural, political and scientific figures of Gandhi’s lifetime. In what is probably the most frequently cited tribute to Gandhi, made on the occasion of Gandhi’s seventieth birthday, Albert Einstein declared: ‘Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.’ On another occasion Einstein wrote: ‘I believe that Gandhi’s views were the most enlightened of all the political men in our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit: not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.’

On 30 January 1948 Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, broadcast to the nation that ‘the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere . . . Our beloved leader, Bapu as we called him, the Father of the Nation, is no more.’2 Nehru continues that he was wrong in stating that the light has gone out. Even a thousand years later, he said, the light that had illuminated India ‘will still be seen in this country and the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living, the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom.’

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr often spoke of his admiration for and indebtedness to Gandhi in his theory and practice of nonviolence and nonviolent activism. In the section ‘Pilgrimage to Nonviolence’ in his book Stride Toward Freedom, King writes: ‘Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.’ King says that the intellectual and moral satisfaction that he failed to gain from Bentham and Mill, Marx and Lenin, Hobbes, Rousseau and Nietzsche, he ‘found in the non-violent resistance philosophy of Gandhi’. According to King, ‘If humanity is to progress, Gandhi is inescapable. He lived, thought, and acted, inspired by the vision of humanity evolving toward a world of peace and harmony. We may ignore him at our own risk.’

At the same time Gandhi was and continues to be very controversial, with many critics and opponents both during his lifetime and during the more than six decades since his death. To cite only one famous illustration from Gandhi’s lifetime, Winston Churchill, who consistently opposes India’s independence from British colonial rule, loathes and has contempt for Gandhi. In 1930 Churchill states: ‘It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’

Even in India today hundreds of millions of Indians oppose Gandhi and Gandhian approaches. These include ‘modern’ Westernized Indians, who view Gandhi as irrelevant or a threat to their values and way of life, various religious nationalists and others with religious, caste, class and revolutionary positions rejecting Gandhi’s nonviolence and approach to truth and reality.

Who was this M. K. Gandhi, so admired and yet so contro-versial? When asked about his philosophy and values, Gandhi typically responded with ‘my life is my message’ and urges others to look at how he lives his life. This is easier said than done.

If you accept the portrayals of Gandhi’s youth, primarily drawn from An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth and other writings, Gandhi’s life journey and incredible achievements would seem almost impossible. Based on his descriptions, the Gandhi aged five or ten or even twenty seems to be an unremarkable young person with many personality flaws and limitations. He is of small physical stature and considers himself unathletic and physically weak. Although he is later known for his strict vegetarianism, he becomes convinced in his youth that only eating meat will make Indians strong like the British. And although he is later known for his incredible fearlessness and his view that true nonviolence is impossible without the greatest courage, he is psychologically fearful and repressed as a youth. He is afraid of thieves, ghosts and serpents, and of sleeping in the dark. He is painfully shy, suffers from an immature self-image and has trouble expressing himself. He considers himself a rather mediocre student. If he is later known for his remarkable will and incredible self-discipline, self-control and capacity for suffering, he nonetheless describes his youthful unrestrained carnal desires. He often treats his young wife Kasturba badly as he is driven by self-centredness, petulance, unrestrained passions and a domineering attitude.

In short, youthful Gandhi considers himself a rather average, unexceptional person with no obvious talent or potential for greatness. How does this Mohandas Gandhi emerge as one of the most remarkable and most admired human beings of the twentieth century (or of any century)?

M. K. Gandhi usually describes his life and his commitments in simple – often in seemingly oversimplistic – terms. He repeatedly attempts to simplify his lifestyle. In critiquing our modern way of living he urges us to simplify our wants and needs and to recognize that simple living is high living. But when compiling, interpreting and analysing these ‘simple’ expressions, one uncovers a very complex, nuanced, multidimensional, at times contradictory, open-ended Gandhi, who is continually remaking himself in his ongoing ‘experiments with truth’.

Unlike the manner in which many devotees and critics regard him, there is no simple Gandhi blueprint or recipe that we can simply apply to contemporary problems in order to come up with Gandhi answers and solutions. The misleadingly oversimplistic and sometimes false portrayal of Gandhi is evidenced in the well-known inspirational Gandhi quotations that often appear on motivational posters, automobile bumper stickers and greeting cards. One thinks of such citations as ‘We must be the change we wish to see in the world’; ‘there is enough in the world for everyone’s need; there is not enough for everyone’s (or anybody’s) greed’; ‘an eye for an eye ends up making the whole world blind’; and ‘God has no religion.’ Sometimes one cannot find the precise quotation in any of Gandhi’s writings, but it is almost always the case that the attribution is the kind of expression consistent with Gandhi’s life and message.

Such a simplistic portrayal is often misleading because it fails to recognize how M. K. Gandhi is contextually engaged and sensitive to changing personal, economic, political, religious and other current issues and crises. He is often full of confusion and doubt, and he struggles to find practical, ethical and spiritual solutions to personal and social problems in his experiments with truth. His action-oriented life and philosophy are realized in practice as expressions of a complex developmental struggle in which he and other imperfect human beings at best move from one limited relative truth to more adequate embodied relative truths.

There may be no famous person of the past century for whom writing about their life, philosophy, significance and legacy poses a greater challenge. Part of the difficulty in reconstructing Gandhi’s remarkable life and interpreting and applying his writings arises from very complex relations between texts by and about Gandhi, extremely diverse contexts and a tremendous range of interpretations. Much of this challenge arises from the sheer volume of writings by and about Gandhi. Although he never wrote a lengthy book, Gandhi was a prolific writer, and The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi comes to a hundred volumes of very diverse and highly fragmented newspaper articles, correspondence, interviews, speeches and other writings.3

Gandhi was a very active journalist, and most of the writings in his Collected Works are short articles published in the four ‘journals’ or newspapers that he started and edited: Indian Opinion, the English weekly newspaper started by Gandhi in South Africa in 1903 and edited by him until he left South Africa in 1914; Young India (the weekly in English) and Navajivan (in Gujarati, with later Hindi editions), two newspapers edited by Gandhi in India from 1919 until his imprisonment in 1932; and Harijan, the English weekly started by Gandhi in 1933. Along with Harijan, Gandhi also started Harijan Bandu (in Gujarati) and Harijan Sevak (in Hindi) so he could better reach the masses of peasants. It has been estimated that Gandhi wrote more than 80 per cent of the articles in these weekly publications, which he viewed as a major way of communicating with, educating and mobilizing Indians. Gandhi also wrote many letters almost every day to individuals and newspapers.4

Much of this challenge in writing about Gandhi also arises from the vast literature of writings about Gandhi.5 At times it seems that everyone who meets Gandhi feels the need to express some strong view of the encounter. There are words, actions, practices and positions for which Gandhi is given credit or blamed that have more to do with the interpreter than with Gandhi. Descriptions and judgements about Gandhi vary so widely that one often wonders if others are focusing on the same Gandhi and his philosophy. It seems more accurate to interpret such writings about Gandhi as presenting multiple, at times contradictory, M. K. Gandhis and Gandhi theories and practices.

Finally, much of this challenge arises from the incredible range of so many diverse contextual influences in shaping Gandhi’s life and message. This can be seen in Gandhi’s experiences in Britain and especially in the more than twenty years in South Africa and the more than thirty years after returning to India. In writing about Gandhi’s life and message one must necessarily be very selective, omitting what others might find contextually revealing, because Gandhi was engaged in, influenced by and the key influencer of so many complex, meaningful and significant personal, social, local, national and even global and world-historical events. These transformative experiments with nonviolence and truth, arising from Gandhi’s contextualized encounters, continue to have great relevance, meaning and significance for major issues of our contemporary world.

While upholding basic ethical and spiritual principles, Gandhi has a remarkable, flexible, open-minded and often changing personality, pursuing truth no matter where it takes him. He is extremely self-critical and continually learning from his ‘failed experiments with truth’. He is continually remaking himself, often learning from the transformative process of engaging new contextual influences. In fact, one can make a very good case that the M. K. Gandhi of the 1940s, well into his seventies and up to his assassination, has the greatest personality development, energy, clarity and creativity of his entire lifetime and the most rigorous, developed and adequate understanding of ethical, economic, political, military and other issues. Over the decades Gandhi learns from traditional and modern contexts, from East and West. The Gandhi philosophies and practices that emerge are new, personal, social, local and global. They are neither exclusively Indian nor Western, neither exclusively traditional nor modern, but potentially of greatest importance, relevance and significance for contemporary India and the world.

In short, what makes writing about Gandhi’s life and philo-sophy so challenging is the fact that one can examine the diverse contextual influences, the extensive Gandhi writings and the huge literature about Gandhi and can then reconstruct numerous, complex, at time contradictory M. K. Gandhis and Gandhi philosophies and practices. One can formulate a Gandhi and Gandhi message that are the repressed, reactionary, antimodern expressions of a charlatan, a shrewd and devious politician, a false religious or spiritual manipulator, someone who provided and continues to offer an irrelevant and even disastrous model for India and the world. Or one can formulate a Gandhi and Gandhi message that are the expressions of one of the most ethical and spiritual exemplary human beings who ever lived, whose message is desperately needed economically, socially, politically, culturally, religiously and environmentally, and whose philosophy and practice are of the greatest significance and relevance for the twenty-first century.

In reconstructing the critical life of Mahatma Gandhi and his legacy for the contemporary world, a primary focus will be placed on his central theory and practice of ahimsa (not harm, generally translated as Nonviolence and often equated with Love). Gandhi is the best known and most influential proponent of nonviolence of the past century. Martin Luther King Jr, Lech Walesa, César Chávez, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama and many other political and spiritual leaders have acknowledged their indebtedness to the formative example of Gandhi’s life and his message of nonviolence. What are the personal and contextual influences that led to Gandhi developing his central commitment to a very broad and deep theory and practice of nonviolence?

M. K. Gandhi gradually develops an ethical and spiritual view of reality that he usually expresses in terms of satya (Truth, often equated with God, Self or Soul). How does Gandhi develop such a view of truth, and why does he claim that violence negates and separates us from reality, whereas only nonviolence (often identified with love-force, soul-force and truth-force) allows us to experience reality?

In this regard Gandhi also gradually develops a very critical view of dominant, Western, industrial ‘Modern Civilization’. What are the personal and larger contextual influences that allow us to understand how and why Gandhi develops his view of dominant Modern Civilization as violent, exploitative, alienating and a barrier to human development? What are his alternative views and practices of a more ethical, more developed, more civilized way of living based on truth and nonviolence?

Finally, in reconstructing the life of Gandhi and his philosophy, with a central focus on violence and nonviolence, one may submit that his personality as an exemplary ethical model of virtue, character and integrity and his nonviolent message are more relevant, significant and desperately needed today than at any time during his lifetime. As indicated above, one must be selective in focusing on certain contextual influences, personal developments and Gandhi’s philosophy and practices. Nevertheless, there is increasing awareness that our modern anti-Gandhi assumptions, values and ways of living our lives are economically unsustainable, environmentally unsustainable and unsustainable in terms of dealing with violence, war, terrorism, exploitation, poverty, racism, sexism, alienation, dehumanization and other forms of humanly caused suffering.

Gandhi’s radically different paradigm, his qualitatively different way of being in the world and living his life, may provide the contemporary world with desperately needed alternatives and with some hope for transforming crises that threaten to destroy life on this planet. Gandhi allows us to recognize the dangers of centralized top-down economic, political and military power and the need for greater decentralization and ‘self-rule’. He offers us possibilities for nonviolent resistance and constructive alternatives to poverty, inequality, exploitation, oppression, alienation, war, terrorism and other forms of violence. And Gandhi may serve as a catalyst for deepening and broadening our awareness, and challenging us to put into practice qualitatively different views of egalitarianism, democracy, human rights, self-determinism and more nonviolent harmonious relations with other humans, all sentient beings and nature.

Gandhi does not have all of the answers. He was an incredible human being, but he was still human, and had many personality flaws and weaknesses. Many of his views were questionable during his lifetime and have no relevance today. That is why we must be flexible and selective in reconstructing, reinterpreting and reapplying his life and message for the contemporary world. Nevertheless, Gandhi’s life, values, philosophy and practices, when reformulated and developed and integrated with complimentary non-Gandhian approaches, may inspire us and provide invaluable responses in addressing the most pressing crises of the twenty-first century.