LESSON TWO

Don’t Be Afraid to Speak Up

Although Grandfather hoped that those who joined him in the ashram were doing so to pursue the higher Truth, there were many who simply joined him as groupies. He tried to make all of us think for ourselves. He believed that you shouldn’t try to please others at a cost to yourself, and he didn’t mind if his followers challenged him.

“A ‘no’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble,” he told us. But it was still hard for most people to question him. He was seen as wise and saintly, and the people who came to the ashram wanted to learn from him.

A “no” uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a “yes” merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

It took my six-year-old sister, Ela, to prove to everyone that speaking up for what you want is not only okay but really important.

When we first arrived at Sevagram, my parents and Ela stayed with me for a week. Ela and I were used to our life at home in South Africa, where we lived on the Phoenix ashram, which Bapuji had also started. It was his first experiment in communal living. At the beginning only our immediate relatives and a few cousins lived there, but soon friends joined, then people who were intrigued by the concept of living in cooperation with each other and nature.

Life at the Phoenix ashram was very simple, but it seemed almost opulent compared to life at Sevagram. At home we had functional furniture and lived in houses of wood and corrugated metal; here it was all mud huts and sitting on the floor. But the biggest difference was the food. At both ashrams we raised crops and ate what we grew, but at Phoenix my mother cooked it into meals with great variety and many spices. The food at Sevagram was (to put it plainly) terrible. Every day we got some version of boiled, unsalted pumpkin. Every meal was as boring and tasteless as the one before. Boiled pumpkin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ela and I complained to our parents, but they hushed us, pointing out that we were guests and needed to follow Bapuji’s plan. We tried talking to the people who worked in the kitchen, but they told us the same thing: “We are following what Gandhi wants.” Everyone assumed that he had decreed the menu, and so there must be a reason for it. We weren’t the only ones who would have liked a different vegetable now and then, but since no one wanted to appear insolent, no one felt comfortable questioning what we ate.

Little Ela had no such compunctions. Toward the end of a week of eating pumpkin, she’d had enough. With all the righteous anger of a six-year-old, she marched into Bapuji’s mud hut. “You should change the name of this place to Kola ashram!” she declared, using the Indian word for pumpkin.

Astounded by this outburst, Bapuji looked up from his work and asked, “What do you mean, my child?”

“Ever since we came here we get nothing but pumpkin to eat, morning, noon, and night. I am sick of it,” she blurted out.

“Is that so?” Bapuji was genuinely astonished. But he had a sense of humor, so he added, “We must look into it. If what you say is right, then we must indeed change the name.”

For himself, Bapuji ate the barest amount necessary for nutrition and often used fasting as a form of nonviolent protest. But he did not expect everyone to follow his stringent and meticulous diet. He was very busy and seldom attended the communal meals, so he hadn’t even known what we were eating.

That evening after the prayer service, when he usually delivered his sermon, he asked the manager of the ashram to explain why everyone was made to eat pumpkin every day. Munna Lal, the manager, asserted that he was trying to follow Grandfather’s instructions to eat only what was grown on the farm.

“Are you saying that our farm can produce only pumpkin?” Bapuji asked.

“You said we should eat simply, so I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“Simple doesn’t mean you have to eat the same thing all the time.”

The manager looked abashed. “We planted a whole field of pumpkins, and we have such a bumper crop that we do not know what to do with them all. That is why we’ve been cooking so much pumpkin,” he confessed.

Bapuji said that wasn’t very good planning. “We should grow a variety of fruits and vegetables but prepare simple meals.” But he never admonished without a solution. “Now since you have a surplus of pumpkins, please take them to the village and barter them for other vegetables.”

Ela was the hero of the day—and not just because the food improved so quickly. Bapuji used her confronting him as a lesson that we should never stop speaking out against problems. How can we create change in the world if we are afraid to say what is wrong?

After Ela and my parents left, I quickly fell into the rhythm of the ashram. Every day I woke up at 4:30 and got ready for the 5 a.m. prayers. Bapuji led the prayers and then spoke to all of us who had gathered about important issues of the day. Sometimes, though, he just addressed practical topics for the ashram, and I would smile to myself, thinking how surprised the world would be to hear the great Gandhi discussing the best way to water vegetables. He never thought any subject was beneath him.

Afterward I exercised for an hour, including some yoga, and then came daily chores. We all had to help with even the most unpleasant duties, like cleaning the toilets. In almost every other place in India, menial tasks were done by only the lowliest castes. But Bapuji believed that breaking down distinctions between people would help end prejudice in the world, so each of us took a turn at the dreariest jobs. Carrying away waste in buckets to be used as compost was the worst for me. At the beginning I scrunched up my nose at the smell and hoped that as Gandhi’s grandson, I might get special treatment. But not a chance! Everyone worked together, and after a while the job didn’t seem so bad. Bapuji’s teaching that everyone was equal made you look at work in a different way.

After chores it was time for breakfast (at last!), and after that I would go outside with my tutor to do my lessons in the blazing sun. The temperature sometimes soared past 115 degrees Fahrenheit, but getting out of the sun wasn’t an option because my eccentric tutor had taken a vow not to seek shelter, though sometimes I was allowed to drape a cotton towel over my head. People on the ashram often took vows as a way of showing mental discipline and the capacity to follow through on their plans—though I would have been happier on those hot days if my tutor was a little less strict in following his vow.

Taking vows was also a common practice in the Hindu tradition. Once, when I was visiting my maternal grandmother, one of my aunts took a vow to eat only two meals a day. We were all together on a picnic, and my sister and I noticed that she didn’t eat lunch but kept munching all afternoon on small candies. We asked her why. “I’ve already eaten breakfast, and now I’m stretching out that one meal until it’s time for dinner!” she explained.

Unlike my aunt, my tutor was stricter with his vows and didn’t cut any corners, so we spent all day outside, with just a half-hour break for lunch. In addition to the heat, it was usually dusty and dry, and when the rains came, the whole place turned into a mud bath. Then came the other extreme, as temperatures in winter plunged to 30 degrees.

Taking a no-shelter vow wasn’t my tutor’s only quirk. He’d once had an argument with another resident and started shouting at him. The matter went to Bapuji, who pointed out to my tutor that he’d said some awful things and needed to learn to control his anger.

“What do you think I should do?” the tutor asked.

“You’re an intelligent man. I’ll leave it to you to decide,” Bapuji answered.

My tutor shocked everyone, including my grandfather, by finding a piece of metal wire and literally sewing his lips together. He wrote a note explaining that his lips would remain sewn shut until he was sure that he wouldn’t lose his temper again. He took a long time convincing himself, and for months he ate only liquids poured into the side of his mouth through a funnel. When I met him, the scars on his upper and lower lips were still fresh. So it wasn’t likely he was going to run under a tree because of a little heat.

Bapuji was comfortable with eccentricity and having your own point of view. But he became exasperated by people who gave up reasoning and stopped thinking for themselves. He would probably be unhappy to find that the habit of following the crowd has only gotten worse as social media lets us “like” and “follow” each other without much thought. A celebrity describes her weight-loss regimen and millions of people try it, even if it makes as little sense as the pumpkin diet. A politician makes rude or bigoted statements and people don’t object because they support the same political party. Religious leaders make pronouncements that deny women’s rights and people accept them without a murmur in the name of tradition.

Many politicians now follow opinion polls before taking a stand on issues and speak out only when it will serve their own interests. They rarely stop to listen to others’ viewpoints because they fear that if they change their opinion they will get pummeled by the press for “flip-flopping.” Bapuji didn’t care about party politics or always needing to be right. He confided to me that he tested new ideas every day and constantly questioned those he held dear. He wouldn’t let himself get complacent. He knew that when you follow any teaching rigidly and dogmatically, you make a mockery of it and undermine its true purpose.

I think Bapuji would have a few things to say to people who aren’t willing to think for themselves and speak out against wrong. Six-year-old Ela could do it, and the rest of us should too. We can’t let ourselves be swept along by others’ visions without stopping to decide if they make sense to our own beliefs. If you are accepting someone else’s definition of right or good and not working to find what you value in yourself, then you are accepting boiled, unsalted pumpkin.

You prove your strength when you find what matters most deeply to you and are willing to stand up for it, even if the tide seems to be going in a different direction.

As Gandhi’s grandson, I have tried to emulate his example of nonviolence and understanding throughout my life. For a while I thought I needed to hew exactly to his path and never deviate. But then I remembered how proud he was when Ela spoke up, and I realized that he would want me to think for myself. He believed in a living philosophy that was always being tested and perfected. I’m not the same person as Bapuji—all you have to do is look at me to know that.

“You are so big and fat and your grandfather was so lean,” kids would say, teasing me, when I returned from India.

Teenagers are always insecure, and being compared to the great Gandhi sometimes seemed more than I could bear.

“How can I live with this legacy?” I asked my mother once.

“If the legacy is a burden, it will get heavy,” she told me wisely. “If it’s a path to meaning and truth, it will feel much lighter.”

After that I ignored the negative comments. I could admire my grandfather and want to further the causes he believed in, but I could still be my own person. Unlike Bapuji, I am not a vegetarian. I tried it but decided not to make it part of my life. I’ve had people come up to me when I was eating dinner at a restaurant as if it were a great “gotcha” moment. They knew I wanted to spread my grandfather’s words, but I had a hamburger in front of me! I would try to explain that Bapuji did not believe you need to sign on to an entire dogma and surrender all sense of yourself. You need to think and question and make yourself part of the process. Rather than betraying my grandfather and his great causes, I am making his philosophy my own.

I learned from Bapuji that you should not live in a particular way only to please others. Following the crowd is no way to create change and improve the world. I often encounter people who work in big companies and stay at their desks late every night because they think it’s what’s expected. Are they really adding value—or are there ways they could be true to themselves and their own families and still get their work done? We have to be careful about following a path that doesn’t make us happy because someone tells us it’s right.

Many of us get caught up in materialistic pursuits because those are the images that get reinforced all around us through advertising, television, films, and social media. On some level we know that getting a bigger house or a faster car won’t be the solution that makes us happier, but we have trouble refusing common expectations and saying, “I want something else.”

Bapuji lived his life in absolute simplicity because he didn’t think one person deserves more than another. When he was younger, however, he didn’t accept that. While practicing law in London, he had a fancy suit made to order on Bond Street so that he would fit in. He even took dancing lessons and bought a violin to try to be a proper English gentleman.

Later, he moved to do law work in South Africa, and for one case, he needed to travel to Pretoria on an overnight train. He entered the first-class compartment with the appropriate ticket, but a tall, rugged white man protested his being there.

“Get out, you coolie,” the man shouted, using the racial slur of the time.

“I have a valid first-class ticket,” my grandfather replied.

“I don’t care what you have. If you don’t get off, I’m calling the police.”

“That is your privilege” was my grandfather’s response. He sat calmly, unwilling to go to the third-class section for nonwhites.

The man left the train and returned with a policeman and a railway official, and the three of them literally threw Grandfather off the train. With smirks on their faces, they pitched his bags after him and signaled for the train to go on.

My grandfather sat overnight on the cold station platform, shivering and thinking about what he wanted to do.

“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings,” he wrote later.

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

That long night on the platform might have been the start of Bapuji’s realization that you have to speak up for what you believe. Acceding to other people’s expectations doesn’t make you happy or whole—and doesn’t make the world any better. It was just a few days after this incident that he began to speak out against racial prejudice in a way that inspired people to respond. He began writing about the plight of Indians in South Africa and condemned the state’s prejudicial policies.

By the time he returned to South Africa a few years later, my grandfather was already known for his strong position against apartheid. He sailed into the harbor along with two shiploads of Indian laborers. The government knew there would be trouble since the whites wanted to keep out immigrants and were furious at my grandfather for supporting the rights of all people. The government didn’t let anybody disembark for nearly two weeks. When my grandfather finally got off the ship, a mob attacked him, beating him savagely until blood was streaming from his head. He could easily have been killed, but he made his way to the home of a friend, where his wife and sons (including my father) were waiting for him. He knew that speaking out against wrongs could be dangerous, but at that moment he decided that would never stop him. The pain of the encounter mattered less than the greater purpose.

One additional twist to that story occurred after the police arrested a few of the men who led the attack on my grandfather. The police asked Bapuji to file a complaint so they could press charges. He declined.

“I’ll have to release them then,” said the surprised police chief.

“That’s fine,” my grandfather replied.

He had decided that if he helped put them in jail, he was as guilty of perpetuating hatred as they were. Maybe hearing that he didn’t believe in violence or revenge would make them rethink their own actions. Sometimes you speak loudest by not yelling.

When he moved back to India, Bapuji began wearing a cotton loincloth and a shawl over his shoulders rather than a shirt and trousers because, he said, he had no right to possess any more than the poorest in India. He didn’t glorify poverty, and he wasn’t naïve about money; he collected as much as he could whenever he traveled to give to those who needed it. But he understood the difference between the basic needs that make a difference in people’s lives and the extravagance that doesn’t.

My parents followed Bapuji’s philosophy, and when I was young, they encouraged me to play with the children of the very poor black farm laborers who lived near our Phoenix ashram. It was one way to speak out against economic distinctions and help me put wealth in perspective. The kids didn’t have any toys, but we would scrounge together to find matchboxes and shirt buttons and would glue them together to build miniature cars. Down at the nearby stream, we dug up black clay soil and molded figurines. We had fun creating things, and we cherished the toys we made. Today many kids get new plastic gadgets all the time, and they’re tired of them in a day or two.

My parents believed that playtime should be constructive, so when I started school I taught my farm friends the ABCs and how to count. As soon as I could read, I taught them too. I was opening a whole new world to them, and they couldn’t wait for me to get home every day. American children might complain that school is boring or dreary, but for these extremely poor children who never dreamed they would be students, learning was a miracle.

Word got around, and soon African parents began arriving from all over and asking me to teach their children. Some walked as far as ten miles with their barefoot children to reach me. So many people came to learn the basics of reading and math that my sister started pitching in, and then my parents got involved. Soon we had a veritable school for the poor. I saw how unfair it is when people want to learn and change their lives but have nobody to help them, and my afternoon lessons became protests against the system. I followed Bapuji’s precept to be the change you want to see in the world. You can speak up with action as well as words.

Following Bapuji’s example, my parents had taken a vow of poverty, so we had only the bare necessities and no savings. But compared to the black Africans around us, we were living a very comfortable life.

My mother found her own way to speak out against the inequality around us, and her actions were eloquent. We had cows that produced more milk than we could consume, so my mother started selling the extra milk to the poor, charging them a penny a pint. She also took a penny for the excess vegetables that we grew on the farm and clothes that she collected from her friends in town. When I was old enough to realize that her prices were ridiculously low, I asked her why she charged anything at all.

“By charging a little, I am recognizing their dignity and giving them pride in the fact that they bought food or clothes for the family,” she explained.

My mother was moved by compassion, not pity, and she wanted to help the people rebuild their self-confidence and self-respect so they could achieve things for themselves. Acting from compassion is much more effective than acting from pity; it also lets us build relationships between different kinds of people. My mother spoke up for the dignity of the poor, just as my grandfather did.

My grandfather had one caveat about speaking up for yourself: he didn’t allow anybody, including himself, to think they were always right or above learning from another’s perspective. Ashram life was designed to help people overcome prejudices and divisions and help foster understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of the differences among human beings.

Bapuji believed that to speak out credibly against injustice and hope to transform society, you had to speak from experience and feel the injustice in your bones.

Speaking out for what you believe is right can sometimes put you in a precarious position. As an adult living back in India, I began studying prejudice because I was interested in how we so foolishly set up divisions between people. One day a woman from Mississippi who was traveling through India visited my office in Mumbai, and we spoke about race in America. I thought it would be interesting to write a comparative study on discrimination in South Africa, India, and the United States. I had learned while living in South Africa that if you weren’t white, you were black, and therefore different. My new friend from Mississippi told me that in America at the time, the racial divide pitted those of African and slave descent against white Americans. In India we didn’t use skin color to determine differences between people, but the caste system dictated which group you belonged to and divided people into groups like Brahmin or untouchable.

The University of Mississippi offered me a fellowship to do this cross-cultural study of prejudice, and my wife and I moved to the States. People heard that Gandhi’s grandson was in America, and I was honored by how many wanted to know more about Bapuji. A year or so later, in 1988, I was invited to speak at the University of New Orleans. The school had publicized the talk, and there were posters all over inviting people to come hear “Gandhi on Racism.” It happened to be the same year the racist and Ku Klux Klan member David Duke was running for the Louisiana House of Representatives.

When we landed in New Orleans, four policemen got on the plane and an announcement was made: “Mr. Gandhi, please step forward.”

I stood up shakily. What had I done? The policemen wouldn’t tell me what was going on, but one said, “This is for your safety.” With two policemen in front of me and two behind, I was escorted off the plane and brought in a car to the university. There I was finally told that the university had received several threatening calls from the KKK, including plans to murder me.

We decided that my speech would go on. The audience was kept well away from me—the first rows of the auditorium were left empty—and I was brought out from the back of the stage at the last moment. Afterward I was whisked back to the airport and held in a special VIP room where the same four policemen stood guard. Finally, I was brought to the plane, the last to board, and settled into a first-class seat the airline had set aside for me. The policemen gave me a quick salute and left.

I learned that day that speaking out can cause upheaval, fear, and conflict long before it results in the change you want. Sometimes it’s easier to keep your head down and not make noise—to eat the boiled pumpkin and figure that it’s safer and less complicated to go along with the crowd. But my grandfather would never do that. Over the years he was beaten and attacked and imprisoned, and there were eight attempts on his life. On one occasion the would-be assassin was caught by volunteers, but Bapuji refused to hand him over to the police. Instead he began a conversation to find out why the man was so eager to kill him. After almost an hour Bapuji accepted that the man was unwilling to reason or change, so he let him go, saying, “Good luck to you. If I am destined to die at your hands no one can save me, and if I am not, you will not succeed.”

Bapuji was willing to face his adversaries and go to jail for what he believed. He got his personal strength from his eagerness to speak out against a system he thought was wrong, and he used nonviolent methods to change it.

Some people might think my grandfather led a life of great deprivation; after all, he didn’t eat much, and he lived in a mud hut and wore a poor-person’s clothes. With all the admiration and renown he achieved, he could have lived in the mansion with the attendants I expected to see when I first arrived at Sevagram ashram. Instead he found what was important and lived a life of passion and compassion. He spoke out for the universal values of goodness and love and peace, and standing up for those right and righteous positions made him happier than a feast in a palace ever could.

Some people might say that David Duke was also speaking out for what he believed when he made racist and incendiary remarks and that he had a right to speak as he did. In American law, speech is protected. But I think we fool ourselves when we pretend that all positions have equal validity. People who are full of hate and divisiveness, bullies who want to suppress everyone’s ideas but their own, bring pain and despair to the world. Our goal should be to oppose such hatred.

My grandfather was shy when he was young, and in the early days of his activism he avoided making speeches. He told me his shyness turned out to be helpful because it made him careful about what he said. “A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech—he will measure every word,” he told me.

A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech—he will measure every word.

I urge you to follow my grandfather’s example and be thoughtful in what you say. Think about whether your words will help the world or hurt it. When you find the words that will do good, be prepared to speak them loudly.