Well-known images and stereotypes of M. K. Gandhi are usually drawn from the last 33 years of his life, which was spent almost entirely in India. Both admirers and critics often focus on one of two oppositional portrayals. Is Gandhi a politician or a religious figure? On the one hand, Gandhi is the spiritual leader, mystical ascetic and religious believer of deep faith. For many admirers he is morally and spiritually so far ahead of his time, too good for this world and ultimately martyred. For many critics he’s a religious charlatan, exploiting his charisma and obscurantist religious authority. On the other hand, Gandhi is the skilful politician, the political leader in India’s struggle for independence and the proponent of a revolutionary nonviolent political vision and method. For many admirers he offers the best hope for a new moral and spiritual way of political engagement that is urgently needed for resolving violent conflicts, terrorism and war. For many critics he is a reactionary, anti-modern, irrelevant politician, who is a shrewd and unscrupulous man ipulator and mixes religion with politics in irrational and dangerous ways.
Gandhi’s life provides considerable evidence, when abstracted and taken out of overall context, to substantiate both images. But neither portrayal of Gandhi in India, the admired or criticized political or religious figure, is fully justified. Gandhi certainly considers himself deeply religious but he is not a traditional religious figure and he rarely identifies with organized institu tionalized religion. Indeed, although Gandhi often makes religious appeals, an open-minded ethical atheist or nonreligious person can easily relate to most of Gandhi’s writings and practices, including most references to ‘God’ who is usually interchangeable with ‘morality’. Gandhi certainly considers himself deeply political but he is not a traditional politician and usually avoids organized political institutions. For Gandhi, any worthy religious approach must be political since it must be concerned with poverty, oppression, exploitation and injustice. For Gandhi, any worthy political approach must religious in the sense that it must be guided by moral and spiritual visions and methods.
The religious and the political, while complementary integral parts of a whole way of being in the world and necessary for restricting and transforming the dangerous tendencies of each by itself, always present a kind of tension in Gandhi’s life, philosophy and practices. Because of the religious–political tension and oscillations, Gandhi often bewilders, subverts and infuriates both supporters and critics as, for example, when he dramatically inserts some moral or spiritual stand in the midst of practical political negotiations and campaigns or when he dramatically inserts some political stand that challenges traditional hierarchical religious discourse and contextualized institutions.
The shifting political–spiritual distinction is valuable for viewing Gandhi’s last 33 years in India. There are periods in which Gandhi’s focus is on the major political work of satyagraha campaigns, political writings and negotiations, doing political research, working with leaders of the Indian National Congress, organizing noncooperation and civil disobedience, going to prison, and political work dominates his life. There are other periods, such as 1922–8 or the mid to late 1930s, in which Gandhi consciously withdraws from active political life and focuses on self-purification, ashram life, constructive work, and ‘nonpolitical’ ethical and spiritual work dominates his life.
The two major concepts or principles in Gandhi’s philosophy are satya (truth, God, being, reality) and ahimsa (nonviolence, love, benevolent harmlessness). The two major ways of implementing truth and nonviolence are through satyagraha (truth-force, soul-force, love-force) and constructive work, as formulated in Gandhi’s Constructive Programme. It is misleading, as is sometimes presented, to view satyagraha campaigns as political and constructive work campaigns as moral and spiritual. For Gandhi the two are inseparable dialectical parts of the whole. Satyagraha, for example, is not simply nonviolent resistance, but is always grounded in and a way of realizing positive moral and spiritual values. Constructive work, as in dealing with problems of poverty and patriarchy and caste oppression, is necessarily political. Nevertheless, there is a valuable distinction of emphasis in Gandhi’s life after returning to India. When he emphasizes satyagraha campaigns, public political organizing, negotiating and struggle dominate his life. When he emphasizes moral and spiritual constructive work, which he says is the life he prefers, he often withdraws from active political engagement.
When Gandhi returns to India he faces several daunting problems. He has no clear direction and feels that he really does not know India. He accepts Gokhale’s advice that he should spend the next year staying out of the public light and getting to know the real India. Although the challenges in South Africa were daunting, in many ways, they were relatively easy compared to what Gandhi faces in India. In South Africa he had much more freedom to experiment than he would have enjoyed in traditional India. The Indian community was modest in size, rather homogeneous, and the Hindus and Muslims Gandhi knew managed to avoid communal religious conflicts. India, by way of contrast, has over 300 million people, most of whom are isolated illiterate village peasants, with no unifying national structure or organization and with endless caste, class, religious, ethnic, linguistic, regional and other divisions. Divided Indians are rendered even more powerless as the most prized jewel in the crown of British colonial divide-and-rule domination and exploitation.
Perhaps the most daunting challenge Gandhi faces is that there are no existing models, structures, organizations or institutions in India to accommodate his emerging philosophy and practices. His approach is remarkably innovative, challenging, and sometimes baffling. He appropriates symbols, values, teachings and practices from traditional India, but he is not a traditional Indian. He appropriates what he finds valuable from the modern West, but he is not an Indian modernist. What is truly astounding in light of these challenges is that, within four years of his return to India, this Gandhi, increasingly confident of the truth of his nonviolent philosophy and methods, emerges as the best-known and most influential leader in India.
Gandhi reaches India on 9 January 1915 and on 25 May he founds Satyagraha Ashram at Kochrab village near Ahmedabad in Gujarat. In the middle of 1917, after the outbreak of plague, he shifts to the banks of the Sabarmati River near Ahmedabad, and he is the leader of the Sabarmati Ashram until the Salt Satyagraha in 1930. At the ashrams he experiments with vows and practices involving nonviolence, truth, respect for all faiths, nonpossession, simple living, celibacy, swadeshi (self-sufficient economy based on one’s local or national products), removal of untouchability and other attempts at constructive work of moral and spiritual regeneration.
In 1917 Gandhi is invited by farmer Rajkumar Shukla to come to the aid of the impoverished suffering peasants of Champaran in north Bihar. The planters, primarily British, require peasants to grow indigo that is no longer profitable and to make cash payments or pay increased rent. Champaran becomes Gandhi’s first satyagraha in India. His method is to do a careful investigation, with interviews and the accumulation of data, so that he can provide an ‘ocular demonstration’ of the grave injustices and suffering. He then tries to remove the injustice through negotiations before resorting to nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. He is successful: the demands for compulsory growing of indigo and required cash payments are abolished. Champaran Satyagraha starts to build Gandhi’s reputation and allows him to begin his increasing identification with Indian peasants and with all who suffer most and are most oppressed. It is an illustration of individual satyagraha.1
In 1918 he is invited by Anasuya Sarabhai, the daughter of a wealthy mill-owner and philanthropist, who is organizing textiles labour along Gandhi lines, to intervene in a strike of Ahmedabad textiles workers demanding higher wages from the mill-owners. Gandhi sides with the workers, tries to establish harmonious relations between them and the owners and, for the first time in a nonviolent struggle, undertakes a fast. This leads to arbitration and an increase in wages. Later in 1918 Gandhi participates in the Kaira Satyagraha (also known as the Kheda Satyagraha), a tax revolt led and organized by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a close Gandhi associate and leader in the freedom movement. In desperate straits after the failure of their crops, the peasants in the Kaira district of Gujarat in the Bombay Presidency rather impressively demand the suspension of land revenue assessments and finally achieve some relief.
These small local campaigns set the stage for Gandhi’s first national satyagraha in 1919. The British, without consulting Indians, publish the unpopular Rowlatt Bills in February 1919. Formulated to suppress Indian anti-colonial terrorism and revolt, the bills, which become law on 18 March, greatly restrict free speech and civil liberties. Gandhi launches the Rowlatt Satyagraha, with a pledge to disobey the law, mass demonstrations and a surprisingly effective hartal (mass protest marked by strike action with cessation of work). British responses include violent repression.
One of the best-known incidents of overt British violence occurs during this period. On 13 April 1919, under the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, armed troops fire on innocent Indians who have assembled in peaceful protest. Dyer justifies the Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre, also known as the Amritsar Massacre, as necessary to teach Indians a lesson. The mass slaughter results in the killing of 378 and the injury of over 1,500 Indians. Gandhi is shocked by the slaughter and the British response, including widespread sympathy in England for Dyer’s position. After observing examples of sporadic Indian violence, Gandhi concludes that it was a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’ on his part to think that Indians are sufficiently prepared and committed for mass nonviolent resistance. He suspends the national satyagraha on 18 April.
The Amritsar Massacre and other examples of British violence produce a significant change in Gandhi’s attitude and approach: British claims now increasingly appear false, immoral and hypocritical. India, not Britain, has the moral high ground, and Gandhi sees the need to end British rule and break with the Empire. This becomes clear in the more ambitious Non-Cooperation Campaign of 1920–22.
The idea of swaraj spreads throughout India and in 1920 Gandhi dramatically announces that India can attain national independence within one year through mass nonviolent means. The Indian National Congress unanimously adopts Gandhi’s resolution to this effect in December. Congress is transformed into a mass organization with Gandhi as its leader. Gandhi relates to the Indian masses, raises issues of poverty and the need for the charka (spinning-wheel), which he has placed on the swaraj-flag. On 31 July 1921 he calls for the boycott of foreign cloth and arranges for such clothes to be discarded through a huge bonfire in Bombay. On 21 September, in Madurai, in solidarity with the poorest of the poor, he discards his remaining attire, shaves his head and wraps himself in the khadi (homespun) loincloth. Nonviolent revolution, using resistance and civil disobedience, seems imminent, and Congress delegates sole executive authority to Gandhi.
There are outbreaks of some Indian violence, and on 5 February 1922 Gandhi is informed of mob violence in Chauri Chaura in Uttar Pradesh the previous day, in which provoked Indians burned a police station, killing 21 policemen and a young boy. Gandhi calls off the national satyagraha campaign. Other leaders, including Nehru, are dismayed. For many, Gandhi’s controversial decision subverts the national determination for anti-colonial independence, plays into the hands of the British rulers and sets back the potential for unifying class, caste and religious national resistance for decades, if not permanently.
Gandhi sees this differently. For him national political independence is less important than moral and social regeneration, and true independence is impossible without nonviolent, truthful self-restraint and self-rule. Once again he feels that he miscalculated and that India is not ready for a real Non-Cooperation Campaign of strong, courageous satyagrahis who embrace and live ahimsa. In addition, Gandhi undergoes a fast of self-purification and penance. Although it seems to many that Gandhi is completely impractical and unrealistic in taking personal responsibility for the actions of distant strangers, he operates from a different frame of reference. Tapping into some traditional Indian spiritual positions, as he does repeatedly in later decades, Gandhi believes that an exemplary personal mode of living has efficacious moral and spiritual power. If others act in ways that are untruthful, violent and evil, this is a reflection of his own imperfection. This means that he must do penance for their sins and this requires his greater moral and spiritual development.
On 10 March 1922 police arrest Gandhi at his ashram on grounds of sedition for articles he published in Young India. In a remarkable trial on 18 March in Ahmedabad, Gandhi defends himself, but it is really British colonialism that is put on trial. He admits to the legal charge but turns the trial into an indictment of unjust British rule, claiming that it is ‘a virtue to be disaffected towards a Government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system’. If the judge agrees with the system, he should inflict the ‘severest penalty’ to which Gandhi will ‘cheerfully submit’. But if the judge disapproves of the prevailing system, it is his duty to condemn the system and then resign. Justice Robert S. Broomfield, moved by Gandhi and his commitment to nonviolence, responds that he is reluctant but required by law to sentence Gandhi. He sentences Gandhi to six years in prison and then states that no one will be more pleased than he if this is later reduced and Gandhi released. The British have learned a lesson. For all of his later arrests and imprisonments, this is the first and only time that Gandhi is allowed to defend himself at a trial.
Discouraged and depressed over the failure of noncooperation and political satyagraha, Gandhi turns inward. He devotes most of his time from 1922 to 1928 to nonviolent experiments with truth involving self-rule, personal and social transformation, and different aspects of his Constructive Programme for moral regeneration. He spends two years in prison, often in solitary confinement. His health deteriorates, and after being rushed to hospital for a dangerous appendectomy operation he is released from prison in 1924 on grounds of health. While in prison he has time for meditative self-reflection. He reads the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Hindu Upanishads, other religious texts and rereads the Gita. He develops his analysis of the unity of all existence, including the unity of all religions, and the nature of nonviolence, love, renunciation, selfless service, truth, God, self and reality. In later years Gandhi often describes imprisonment as peaceful and joyful. It is a welcome relief from the overwhelming daily demands of public life and it provides him with time for reading, writing and self-purification.
During his Constructive Programme emphasis in the 1920s, Gandhi focuses on four major concerns which dominate the rest of his life: Hindu–Muslim harmonious relations, the spinning-wheel and decentralized khadi production, the removal of untouchability and the social uplift of women. These are not isolated concerns and all address issues of poverty, divisiveness and violence and aim at realizing the fundamental interconnectedness and unity of all existence. Each of these concerns is realized in diverse, complex, difficult, changing, contextual situations, is given many significant reformulations by Gandhi, and raises ongoing controversies and debates about Gandhi and his legacy.2
Gandhi, who experienced positive Muslim–Hindu unity in South Africa, places this at the top of his Constructive Programme agenda, but his attempts at unity in India are increasingly failures. In 1919 he is approached by Indian Muslims asking him to support and provide leadership to the postwar Khilafat (Caliphate) movement that attempts to restore the Turkish Sultan to the position of authority held during the Ottoman Empire. Although the Khilafat would seem at odds with Gandhi’s views of religion, politics and religious-political relations, he agrees on the condition that the Ali brothers Muhammad and Shaukat and other Khilafat leaders accept nonviolence. For Gandhi, this is a way of supporting Indian Muslims and furthering Hindu–Muslim unity as part of India’s struggle for swaraj. This is the period of greatest trust and most harmonious Muslim–Hindu relations, but Gandhi’s endorsement of Khilafat is baffling and controversial, not just to Hindus but even to most modern Muslim leaders. Even Khilafat Muslims never endorse Gandhi’s ahimsa as a philosophy, and Hindu–Muslim disunity surfaces in the coming years. Although Gandhi continues to give Hindu–Muslim unity and harmonious relations a high priority throughout the 1930s and 1940s, with rare dramatic exceptions this is a period of deteriorating trust, greater factionalism and increasing multidimensional violence.3
Over the decades Gandhi has more success in popularizing the charka (spinning-wheel) and khadi (handspun cloth), even among many modern Indians who find it a backward technology and premodern economy. After becoming President of the Indian National Congress in 1924, the only time he held such political office, Gandhi founds the non-Congress All-India Spinners’ Association in 1925. He becomes increasingly fond of the spinning-wheel and sometimes asserts that it is the indispensable means to swaraj. For Gandhi it functions on many interrelated levels, including symbolically. For India’s 700,000 villages and its devastating poverty, emphasizing the spinning-wheel can provide employment, resist the modern ‘machine craze’ that displaces and dehumanizes labour, and allow for small-scale, decentralized, sustainable economies upholding the dignity of labour. It serves an egalitarian function, allowing the privileged to identify with the plight of the least fortunate and to overcome class, caste and other oppressive relations. It is meditative, as well as productive, integrating mind and body, and provides selfless service to meet the needs of others. It serves as a powerful symbol and means towards the self-reliance and independence of swaraj, the self-sufficient economy of swadeshi, the moral economic philosophy of striving for ‘the welfare of all’ or sarvodaya, realizing the Constructive Programme and engaging in nonviolent, unifying sarvodaya campaigns.
Recognizing the symbolic is imperative for Gandhi and for interpreting his exemplary model, lessons and legacy, including ‘Mahatma Gandhi’ as symbol. Gandhi is always very conscious of the need to utilize powerful symbols that not only symbolize specific contextualized issues, injustices and ideals but, even more importantly, are living symbols that key into and activate the deepest forces of nonviolence, truth, love and compassion within us. In this regard, it is commonplace for critics and even some admirers of the historical Gandhi to assert that, say, emphasizing the spinning-wheel and the production of homespun cloth is outdated, impractical and completely irrelevant when addressing issues of the modern globalized economy. However, the issues, concerns and alternative values and approaches symbolically represented by the spinning-wheel are still relevant and significant today.
Removal of untouchability is one of Gandhi’s major priorities in the Constructive Programme. For him, if Hinduism cannot remove the blot of untouchability it should cease to exist. In 1924 he supports the Vykom (Vaikom) Satyagraha in Travancore, now part of Kerala, agitating against caste restrictions denying untouchables access to public roads near the Shiva Temple. While Gandhi places even greater emphasis on defying traditional regulations and eliminating untouchability during his remaining years in India, this becomes and still is a source of great conflict and controversy. Gandhi, not unexpectedly, is opposed mainly by traditional caste-based Hindus, but also later by various dalits, especially followers of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, who – born an untouchable – became an influential jurist, scholar and social reformer. Dalits (those who have been ‘ground down’ or ‘broken to pieces’) often submit that Gandhi is paternalistic in claiming to speak for untouchables and that he really endorses a reactionary caste system.
Regardless of differing interpretations and positions on these dalit issues, it seems clear that Gandhi is always sincere in his opposition to specific institutions and practices of untouchability. Indeed, he is willing to put his family, his ashrams and his life at risk and even to die for this cause. In terms of the larger issues surrounding Gandhi’s changing formulations about caste, there is room for debate. However, if one examines Gandhi’s personality, his philosophy, his practices, how he actually lives his life, the most adequate interpretation is that Gandhi is at odds with hierarchical, institutionalized, caste-based Hinduism and that Gandhi’s message is essentially anti-caste.
Finally, the social uplift of women becomes a major pillar in Gandhi’s Constructive Programme in the 1920s and for the rest of his life. Starting as the abusive, domineering, patriarchal Mohandas, Gandhi radically transforms and remakes himself in his approach to women and gender relations. What is most significant in his ashram work, as well as in his approach to gender relations in society at large, is his radical egalitarianism, with his strong critique of male domination and his affirmation that women should be treated with respect as equal human beings entitled to equal freedom and opportunities. His evolved position is that gender relations should be morally and spiritually constituted by equal partners. At times Gandhi even claims that women are superior since they most express his values of nonviolence, love, patience, empathy, voluntary suffering and selfless service.
Such egalitarian and lofty views of women do not remove all controversies, including some of Gandhi’s limited and reactionary views on gender. This is evidenced in some of his male-language normative formulations and in his reactionary formulations on birth control measures as unnatural and immoral, and his disturbing passages on the personal responsibility and recommended responses of rape victims. Gandhi’s inadequate approach is evident in his reactionary views of the undesirability of sexual relations except for reproduction, and his dismissal of any positive value to sexual pleasure, as well as his scandalous experiments with brahmacharya late in life (see chapter Five).
What is truly astounding in the Constructive Programme and the freedom struggle is how millions of Indian women are so attracted to Gandhi and his message. He often appears to them as embodying ‘the feminine’ and as more androgynous than exclusively male. In their dominant contexts of repressive male-dominated violence they are drawn to Gandhi and his more secure and comforting message of nonviolence. As is the case with millions of illiterate peasants, male and female, women often feel that Gandhi really understands and identifies with their difficult situations and that he is willing to sacrifice everything for their social uplift. Remarkably, they courageously defy family, caste, religious and other social taboos and coercive measures and become active participants in the Constructive Programme and the satyagraha struggles. In general Gandhi’s Constructive Programme regarding women and gender equality is far ahead of its time in India of the 1920s and, in its basic egalitarian rela tional values, remains ahead of its time in contemporary India and the world.
Gandhi returns to active public political life in 1928, after the British government establishes a constitutional reform commission under Sir John Simon that includes no Indian members. In the anti-Simon Commission atmosphere, Congress considers the Nehru Report, named after Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, which calls for Dominion Status for India. At the December Congress Party meeting in Calcutta, Gandhi pushes through a resolution giving the British government one year to grant India dominion status or face a new campaign of noncooperation with the goal of complete independence. As is often the case, Gandhi shows great skill in mediating conflicting positions in the Indian National Congress and arriving at a compromise. He moderates the more forceful views of the younger Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and others who demand immediate complete independence, and he pushes others beyond the self-imposed limits of their gradual legal appeals for modest reform. When the British do not respond, the Indian flag is unfurled at the Lahore Congress session on 31 December. Swaraj is to mean Purna Swaraj or complete independence and 26 January 1930 is to be celebrated as India’s Independence Day. In post-colonial India 15 August, the date selected by the British for India’s independence in 1947, is celebrated as Independence Day, and 26 January, the date selected by Congress, remains a major national holiday celebrated as India’s Republic Day.
Gandhi’s previously shattered faith in nonviolent political struggle is renewed after the economic Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928, under the leadership of Sardar Patel, in which rural Gujarati peasants are victorious in defying the greatly increased land revenue assessments and higher taxes. Consistent with the Calcutta Congress resolution, Gandhi is authorized by Congress to head up a new campaign of nonviolent noncooperation and civil disobedience.
In February 1930 Gandhi decides to organize the satyagraha against the British tax on salt. His choice of salt, as opposed to complete independence or some other lofty goal, baffles not only the British rulers but also his Congress supporters. Once again, others misunderstand and underestimate Gandhi’s contextual insights, capacity to identify with and motivate the Indian masses and brilliant use of powerful symbols to reveal injustices and activate nonviolent forces for moral regeneration.
Gandhi launches the Salt March from his Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March, not initially as a mass satyagraha but as Gandhi’s satya graha, consisting of 78 carefully chosen ashram satyagrahis, who undertake the 241-mile march to the seacoast village of Dandi. Gandhi spends time each day during the 24-day march citing religious scriptures, opposing poverty and alcoholism and child-marriages, promoting other principles of constructive work, as well as advocating nonviolent civil disobedience of the salt tax. Partici pa tion and excitement grow, as Gandhi skilfully manages local, national and international coverage. For Gandhi and millions of others, non violence and truth are on the march. Arriving at Dandi on 5 April, Gandhi goes to the sea coast the next morning and picks up the natural salt, thus defying the government’s ban. Gandhi’s example spreads like a ‘prairie fire’, in Nehru’s admiring words, and millions become involved in manufacturing, selling and buying illegal salt. Many are beaten and over 60,000, including Gandhi, arrested.
The Salt Satyagraha and its aftermath reveal Gandhi at his most impressive moral and spiritual way of being in the world.4 He upholds truth and nonviolence through Constructive Programme and action-oriented satyagraha. As with the spinning-wheel, salt has immediate, visible, practical dimensions, but it has even greater symbolic dimensions going far beyond the issue of the specific salt tax. On the most basic level of need salt is a necessity of life, and Indians, especially the impoverished masses, are denied access and unfairly burdened. Salt Satyagraha is a way that the privileged can identify with and relate selflessly and compassionately to the needs of the untouchables and others who are most impoverished, exploited and oppressed. Salt Satyagraha, focusing on a universal need, can unite Muslims and Hindus, the religious and nonreligious, different classes and castes, men and women. In fact many observe that this campaign is remarkable for the widespread participation of women, who experience resistance to salt tax injustice as integrating the personal in their lives with the political.
In larger terms the Salt Satyagraha goes far beyond salt and dramatically symbolizes and brings into clear daylight not only the injustices and violence of British colonial domination but also the basic human right to have access to necessities to meet human needs, the basic human duty or dharma to provide for those rights, the basic equality and integrity and unity of all human beings and the need to motivate and activate our nonviolent truth-force and love-force through noncooperation with evil and injustice.
The Salt Satyagraha represents the high point of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns and the time of his greatest influence. It is his best organized, most disciplined and most effective nonviolent campaign in exposing the injustice, moral bankruptcy and violence of British rule in India and the moral superiority of the nonviolent Indian struggle for freedom and independence. The period of the Salt March and civil disobedience, extending through Gandhi’s participation as the sole representative of the Indian National Congress at the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, is the high point in Gandhi’s popularity and prestige. He appears to hundreds of millions not only as the fearless, self-sacrificing Indian national leader, but also emerges as a greatly admired international figure of exemplary moral and spiritual virtue. As said at the time, the Salt Satyagraha marks the end of British colonial rule and the independence of India, even if it takes an additional seventeen difficult years to achieve.