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How Gandhi Became Gandhi

By Geoffrey C. Ward

• March 24, 2011

Some years ago, the British writer Patrick French visited the Sabarmati ashram on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat, the site from which Mahatma Gandhi led his salt march to the sea in 1930. French was so appalled by the noisome state of the latrines that he asked the ashram secretary whose job it was to clean them.

A sweeper woman stopped by for an hour a day, the functionary explained, but afterward things inevitably became filthy again.

But wasn’t it a central tenet of the Mahatma’s teachings that his followers clean up after themselves?

“We all clean the toilets together, on Gandhiji’s birthday,” the secretary answered, “as a symbol to show that we understand his message.”

Gandhi had many messages, some ignored, some misunderstood, some as relevant today as when first enunciated. Most Americans — many middle-class Indians, for that matter — know what they know about the Mahatma from Ben Kingsley’s Academy Award-winning screen portrayal. His was a mesmerizing performance, but the script barely hinted at the bewildering complexity of the real man, who was at the same time an earnest pilgrim and a wily politician, an advocate of celibacy and the architect of satyagraha (truth force), a revivalist, a revolutionary and a social reformer.

It is this last avatar that interests Joseph Lelyveld most. “Great Soul” concentrates on what he calls Gandhi’s “evolving sense of his constituency and social vision,” and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once “worshipful and obdurate.” Lelyveld is especially qualified to write about Gandhi’s career on both sides of the Indian Ocean: he covered South Africa for The New York Times (winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book about apartheid, “Move Your Shadow” ), and spent several years in the late 1960s reporting from India. He brings to his subject a reporter’s healthy skepticism and an old India hand’s stubborn fascination with the subcontinent and its people.

This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi’s life, and while the book includes a bare-bones chronology and is helpfully divided into South African and Indian sections, it moves backward and forward so often, it’s sometimes harder than it should be to follow the shifting course of Gandhi’s thought.

But “Great Soul” is a noteworthy book, nonetheless, vivid, nuanced and cleareyed. The two decades Gandhi spent in South Africa are too often seen merely as prelude. Lelyveld treats them with the seriousness they deserve. “I believe implicitly that all men are born equal,” Gandhi once wrote in the midst of one of his campaigns against untouchability. “I have fought this doctrine of superiority in South Africa inch by inch.”

It actually took a long time for the Mahatma to turn that implicit belief into explicit action, Lelyveld reminds us. When Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in Durban from Bombay in 1893, he was a natty 23-year-old British-trained lawyer, hired to help represent one wealthy Muslim Indian trader in a dreary civil suit against another, and primarily interested in matters of religion and diet, not politics: in an early advertisement he proclaimed himself an “Agent for the Esoteric Christian Union and the London Vegetarian Society.” But, Lelyveld writes, “South Africa . . . challenged him from the start to explain what he thought he was doing there in his brown skin.”

Initially, Gandhi was simply affronted that discriminatory laws and bigoted custom lumped educated well-to-do Indians like him with “coolies,” the impoverished mine, plantation and railroad workers who made up the bulk of the region’s immigrant Indian population. The nonviolent campaigns he waged to bring about equality between Indians and whites over the next 20 years would lead him — slowly and unsteadily, but inexorably — to advocate equality between Indian and Indian, first across caste and religious lines and then between rich and poor. (His identification with the aspirations of black people would not come until long after he had left Africa.)

As Lelyveld shows, the outcomes of Gandhi’s campaigns in South Africa were neither clear-cut nor long-lasting: after one, his own supporters beat him bloody because they thought he’d settled too quickly for a compromise with the government. But they taught him how to move the masses — not only middle-class Hindu and Muslim immigrants but the poorest of the poor as well. He had, as he himself said, found his “vocation in life.”

Soon after returning to India in 1915, Gandhi set forth what he called the “four pillars on which the structure of swaraj ” — self-rule — “would ever rest”: an unshakable alliance between Hindus and Muslims; universal acceptance of the doctrine of nonviolence, as tenet, not tactic; the transformation of India’s approximately 650,000 villages by spinning and other self-sustaining handicrafts; and an end to the evil concept of untouchability. Lelyveld shrewdly examines Gandhi’s noble but doomed battles to achieve them all.

He made a host of enemies along the way — orthodox Hindus who believed him overly sympathetic to Muslims, Muslims who saw his calls for religious unity as part of a Hindu plot, Britons who thought him a charlatan, radical revolutionaries who believed him a reactionary. But no antagonist was more implacable than Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the brilliant, quick-tempered untouchable leader — still largely unknown in the West — who saw the Mahatma’s nonviolent efforts to eradicate untouchability as a sideshow at best. He even objected to the word ­Gandhi coined for his people — “Harijans” or “children of God” — as patronizing; he preferred “Dalits,” from the Sanskrit for “crushed,” “broken.”

Sometimes, Gandhi said Indian freedom would never come until untouchability was expunged; sometimes he argued that untouchability could be eliminated only after independence was won. He was unapologetic about that kind of inconsistency. “I can’t devote myself entirely to untouchability and say, ‘Neglect Hindu-Muslim unity or swaraj ,’ ” he told a friend. “All these things run into one another and are interdependent. You will find at one time in my life an emphasis on one thing, at another time on [an]other. But that is just like a pianist, now emphasizing one note and now [an]other.” It was also like the politician he said he was, always careful to balance the demands of one group of constituents against those of another.

As Lelyveld has written in “Move Your Shadow,” “Gandhi had hoped to bring about India’s freedom as the moral achievement of millions of individual Indians, as the result of a social revolution in which the collapse of alien rule would be little more than a byproduct of a struggle for self-reliance and economic equality.” Foreign rule did collapse, in the end, “but strife and inequality among Indians ­worsened.”

Gandhi is still routinely called “the father of the nation” in India, but it is hard to see what remains of him beyond what Lelyveld calls his “nimbus.” His notions about sex and spinning and simple living have long since been abandoned. Hindu-Muslim tension still smolders just beneath the uneasy surface. Untouchability survives, too, and standard-issue polychrome statues of Ambedkar in red tie and double-breasted electric-blue suit now outnumber those of the sparsely clothed Mahatma wherever Dalits are still crowded together.

Gandhi saw most of this coming and sometimes despaired. The real tragedy of his life, Lelyveld argues, was “not because he was assassinated, nor because his noblest qualities inflamed the hatred in his killer’s heart. The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced, like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world.”

Nonetheless, Lelyveld also writes, while he may have “struggled with doubt and self until his last days,” Gandhi “made the predicament of the millions his own, whatever the tensions among them, as no other leader of modern times has.” And, for all his inconsistencies, his dream for India remained constant throughout his life. “Today,” Gandhi wrote less than three weeks before he was murdered by a member of his own faith, “we must forget that we are Hindus or Sikhs or Muslims or Parsis. . . . It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes.”

That was a revolutionary notion when he first urged Indians to unite against their oppressors in South Africa before the turn of the 20th century. It was revolutionary when he came home to India at the time of World War I, and still revolutionary in 1947 when India was simultaneously liberated and ripped apart by the religious hatred he had repeatedly risked his life to quell, and sadly, it remains revolutionary today — for India and, by extension, for the wider world as well.

Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India

By Joseph Lelyveld

Illustrated. 425 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.

Geoffrey C. Ward, a biographer and a screenwriter for documentary films, spent part of his boyhood in India and is currently writing a book about partition.

Gandhi: An Autobiography

Mahatma gandhi , mahadev desai  ( translator ).

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Mahatma Gandhi

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“My life from this point onward has been so public that there is hardly anything about it that people do not know.”

I understand more clearly today what I read long ago about the inadequacy of all autobiography as history. I know that I do not set down in this story all that I remember. Who can say how much I must give and how much omit in the interests of truth? And what would be the value in a court of law of the inadequate ex parte evidence being tendered by me of certain events in my life? If some busybody were to cross-examine me on the chapters already written, he could probably shed much more light on them, and if it were a hostile critic’s cross-examination, he might even flatter himself for having shown up ‘the hollowness of many of my pretensions’.

But it is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography. But I shall not mind, if every page of it speaks only of my experiments. I believe, or at any rate flatter myself with the belief, that a connected account of all these experiments will not be without benefit to the reader.

"I might [=could] not take cow's or buffalo's milk, as I was bound by a vow. The vow of course meant the giving up of all milks, but as I had mother cow's and mother buffalo's only in mind when I took the vow, and as I wanted to live, I somehow beguiled myself into emphasizing the letter of the vow , and decided to take goat's milk"

"I will not say that I was indifferent to their literary education, but I certainly did not hesitate to sacrifice it. My sons have therefore some reason for a grievance against me. Indeed they have occasionally given expression to it, and I must plead guilty to a certain extent."

"Only this much I knew--that under ideal conditions, true education could be imparted only by the parents, and that then there should be the minimum of outside help; that Tolstoy Farm was a family, in which I occupied the place of the father; and that I should so far as possible shoulder the responsibility for the training of the young."

"I succumbed. My intense eagerness to take up the Satyagraha fight had created in me a strong desire to live, and so I contented myself with adhering to the letter of my vow only, and sacrificed its spirit.[...] The will to live proved stronger than the devotion to truth, and for once the votary of truth compromised his sacred ideal by his eagerness to take up the Satyagraha fight."

"So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature , since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

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The Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi for the Twenty-First Century (review

Related Papers

Economic & Political Weekly

Prof. (Dr.) Sanjeev Kumar

London: Routledge

‘Mahatma Gandhi has made a lasting contribution to political philosophy and this requires that succeeding generations of scholars interpret that contribution in ways that meet the needs of the changing times and intellectual trends. Gandhi and the Contemporary World meets this requirement very admirably: it presents Gandhi in a critical, lively and timely fashion. Enjoy this excellent addition to Gandhi literature’. Anthony J. Parel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada ‘

The Journal of Asian Studies

David Fahey

Routledge:London

‘Mahatma Gandhi has made a lasting contribution to political philosophy and this requires that succeeding generations of scholars interpret that contribution in ways that meet the needs of the changing times and intellectual trends. Gandhi and the Contemporary World meets this requirement very admirably: it presents Gandhi in a critical, lively and timely fashion. Enjoy this excellent addition to Gandhi literature’. Anthony J. Parel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Calgary, Canada ‘This riveting collection of essays included in the volume throws valuable light on Mahatma Gandhi’s activist political philosophy and on some of its legacies today.Comprehensively discussed and examined are his ideas of truth and non-violence in their bearing on his conception of satyagraha and on his approach to the postcolonial Indian nation’. Thomas Pantham, former Professor at M S University of Baroda, Baroda, India

The volume examines diverse facets of Gandhi’s holistic view of human life – social, economic and political – for the creation of a just society. Bringing together expert analyses and reflections, the chapters here emphasise the philosophical and practical urgency of Gandhi’s thought and action. They explore the significance of his concepts of truth and nonviolence to address moral, spiritual and ethical issues, growing intolerance, conflict and violence, poverty and hunger, and environmental crisis for the present world. The volume serves as a platform for constructive dialogue for academics, researchers, policymakers and students to re-imagine Gandhi and his moral and political principles. It will be of great interest to those in philosophy, political studies, Gandhi studies, history, cultural studies, peace studies and sociology.

Lester R Kurtz

Dezső Szenkovics

The central question emphasized by the paper is that whether in the 21 st century's globalized world the Gandhian message still has or could have any actuality in managing our century's real challenges such as terrorism or the deepening moral crisis of the humanity. In order to be able to do this, the paper will fi rst of all present, analyse and comment on the most important concepts I consider the Gandhian thought is based on such as satya (Truth), ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha (as Gandhi loosely translated: holding on to truth, which in fact is the philosophy and practice of the non-violent resistance). I have to admit that in my paper I will consider Gandhi as a philosopher or a thinker even if he did not agree with me or even if it were hard to consider him a philosopher according to European traditions and European canon regarding philosophy. As we know, he personally declared that writing an academic text was beyond his power and he was not built for such kind of writings. Secondly, the paper will emphasize those aspects and concepts of the Gandhian thought which could give an answer to the core question of the paper, trying to prove that at least two of the presented concepts could be considered relevant and useful in our times, even if at fi rst impression all of these key concepts of the Gandhian thought seem to be a utopia and useless. It seems that Gandhi, through his ideas and thoughts, " is still alive " and is among us after more than 60 years of his death. It seems that we, all human beings, still have to learn from the ideas, from the writings and acts of the Mahatma.

Faisal Devji

FD: Gandhi understood that self-interest, whether in its individual or collective form, represents the basic category of liberal politics. He also realised that it is not something given to us by nature but has to be set in place through considerable effort. Since interest conceived as ownership was tied to the regime of private property, however, it could only have a marginal existence in a place like India, where property and so ownership had not yet come to define all social relations. This meant that Indian social relations were often marked by modes of behaviour and practice, both violent and non-violent, that could not be accommodated within the logic of interest. Instead of trying to eliminate these altogether, which he thought an impossible task, Gandhi wanted to purify and expand them as forms of disinterest and altruism that deployed sacrifice in the cause of non-violence. He argued that all societies were in fact founded upon such sacrificial or disinterested relations, i...

IMMANUEL GANESAN

The 21 st Century is identified as the age of growth and development. In midst of all the developments, it is the acceptable hour to stand still and think 'Is India really developing?' and 'Is humaneness present in human life?' An inquest into these two questions, reminds a lot about our charismatic leader Mahatma Gandhi, his philosophy and his teachings. This article envisages the facts behind the relevance of Gandhiji and his philosophy in today's sociopolitical environment.

nidhi singh

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Book Review- An Autobiography or The story of my experiments with Truth

In this review, I gave a brief account of the author of this book M.K. Gandhi and the reason behind him in writing this autobiography. I gave an explanation why Gandhi gave the tittle 'The story of my experiments with truth' rather than 'An autobiography' to his book which he used it only as a sub-tittle. I gave a brief summary of the various things present in different parts of this book for the benefit of the reader. I gave my personal opinion about this book as well as what makes this book worth reading.

About the Author The author of this book is the most popular legendary person of the twentieth century, Father of our Nation, Mahatma in the eyes of people, the person who sacrificed his whole life for the cause of independence to the country, the person who advocated principles of Truth, Satyagraha, Non-violence and spiritual thoughts of Self realization to the people, who is none other than Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Why Gandhi wrote his Autobiography? At around year 1920, some of his co-workers insisted him to write his autobiography. He was unable to carry out this work at that time because he was deeply involved in independence movement. Later on the insistence of one of his co-worker Swami Anand, Gandhi agreed to write his autobiography little by little in the form of small chapters to a magazine Navajivan to which Gandhi usually write his articles. But one of his close friend advised him that the principles what he advocate today in his autobiography, for any reason, if he changes in future there may not be any value for his words in people. This advise affected Gandhi very much and so he changed his mind regarding this autobiography. Finally Gandhi decided to write his personal experiences of the experiments what he has conducted on truth during his life time. The reason for this Gandhi made it clear in his introductory words of this book that he never want to boast himself as a hero in the minds of the people but he wants to transfer some good thoughts to the reader that he experienced during his life time. What is there in this book? 'The story of my experiments with truth' is in five parts which begins with Gandhi's birth and his experiences in his personal life till 1921. The original script was written in Gujarati language by M.K. Gandhi to Navajivan magazine and it was later translated into English by Mahadev Desai. According to Mahadev Desai the sub-tittle Autobiography was given by Gandhi himself for his 'The story of My experiments with Truth'. In this book, Gandhiji mainly emphasized his experiments on his principles of truth, non-violence, spiritualism, celibacy, self realization, vegetarianism etc. Gandhi requested the readers to conduct similar such experiments in their life in their own way in quest of truth. A brief summary of the five parts found in this autobiography was given below for the interest of the readers. Part one In this part Gandhiji introduced his family members and the details about his birth to the readers. He narrated about his childhood days in this part in an interesting way. He rated himself as an average student with a shy character to intermingle with others. At the same time Gandhi's rejection to copying incident at school, an anecdote one has to know through Gandhi's words only. Two things which literally helped in his character building at this age are a play let Shravana Pitribhakti Nataka (a story about Shravanas devotion to his elderly parents) and the other is Satyaharischandra (a character of purana who never speaks lie even at the cost of his life) play. His child marriage with Kasturba, death of his father, his journey to England to earn law degree, the problems he faced there with their culture as well as his strict adherence to vegetarianism, religious foundation he got through Gita and Bible are the interesting things that the reader can get a first hand information from this part. Part Two To deal with a case Gandhi went to South Africa and there he was humiliated by racial discrimination incident in a first class coach. Gandhiji was very much moved by the oppressive and racial discrimination methods shown by South African rulers over the Indians who are living there. This heart throbbing situation of local Indians in South Africa made him a confident and strong leader. Part three Along with his family Gandhi went to South Africa to work with local Indians. He decided to completely dedicate his life to human service. He used to attend hospitals daily for two hours to clean the wounds of the patients and even clean toilets. At this time he developed the concepts of Brahmacharya, Non-violence and Satyagraha which later helped in the battle against British rulers in India. Finally the mission lead by Gandhi in South Africa has tasted success and that is the first win for Gandhi as a leader. Part Four Gandhi's increased interest in practicing vegetarianism, experiments of truth in court cases, experiments with satyagraha, experimenting Naturopathy in treating diseases, fasting method to self restraining, training of the spirit, meeting with Gokhalae are the interesting things found in this part. Part Five People treated Gandhiji as hero after his successful mission at South Africa. On the request of his political guru Gokhale, Gandhiji traveled throughout India and that made him realize the poor condition of Indians at the hasty rule of British. Champran satyagraha, Ahamedabad satyagraha, Kheda satyagraha, Satyagraha against Rowalat's act are important events we can know from this part. What makes this book worth reading? 1. A legendary and most popular person like Gandhi in his own words giving about the experiences of his personal life and an account of various events which occurred during independence struggle at that time will create a lot of interest among the people to read this book. Those who want to know history of Indian independence struggle, by reading this book they get a first hand information from a person who actually lead the struggle from front. 2. In writing this book Gandhi hide nothing the information that can reach the people whether it is good or bad.He was harsh on himself in admitting his mistakes as well as the ways he used to correct his mistakes. This sincerity or honesty of this great person had an influence on increasing the value of this book. 3. An average ordinary person who is shy even to mingle with others how he became 'Mahatma (great soul)' in the eyes of the people? How this simple person with his magnificent power of attraction able to bring millions of people together to fight against British?To know the answers for these questions one has to read the autobiography of M.K. Gandhi. 4. The simple and lucid style of his writing will help the readers to understand things easily. The various events and incidents which he experienced during his life time he put forth in this book in a very interesting way. These experiences enrich the reader with the values and principals followed by Gandhiji during his life time. Gandhiji used to practice anything before he actually preach to any body. This principle that Gandhiji followed throughout his life brought millions of admirers to him to unite and fight against British. 5. Readers can experience the values of spiritualism, truthfulness, non-violence, self realization etc. from the illustrations he made in this book. From Tolstoy form experience in South Africa, Gandhiji realized that the young can be trained only through spiritual training. Spiritual training helps to mold the character of an individual. Without character building there is no value for education in young. Similarly in Gandhiji's opinion Truth is God. Through truth only self realization occur in a person. The experiments on truth that Gandhiji carried through out his life for the purpose of this self realization only. During independence struggle Gandhiji preached non-violence to people which became a weapon in achieving independence to India. My opinion about this book 'An autobiography or The story of my experiments with truth' written by M.K. Gandhi is highly inspiring book and in my opinion it ought to be read by every Indian. After reading this book, definitely every reader will appraise Gandhi's honesty and sincerity in presenting every minute details of his personal life without hiding anything to the reader, even though such incidents presented by him may derogate his value. I really appreciated this nature of Gandhi in my mind after reading this book. Gandhi put to practice the things before he actually preach them to others. I really appreciate this attitude of Gandhi and sincerely believe that this is the reason why millions of people through out the World whether supporters or opponents admired him and like to have a glimpse of him at least once in their life time. One more thing I realized about Gandhiji after reading this book and I really appreciate is the modest way he lead his life. The autobiography that Gandhi wrote is simply superb, especially he narrated all the events which occurred in his life very interestingly as well as the language used for this narration is very simple even to the understanding level of a common man. Conclusion Without doubt this is one of the most popular and famous book of this century. Gandhi gave utmost importance to principals, values and humanity rather than his life itself. Gandhiji lived his whole life as an example to others rather than simply preaching values to others. The great scientist, Albert Einsteen rightly remarked, the generation to come may not believe such a person like Gandhi with blood and flesh has walked on this earth. People have realized the importance of the principals and values of Gandhiji at present than before. Big people like Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and American President Oboma became ardent admirers of Gandhi. Without any doubt the centuries to come Gandhiji will be remembered by people of any generation for the non-violent way he got independence to India.

Amazing work. Thank you for the ton of information which also helped me in a project.

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Book Review: “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India”

We are delighted to welcome Sangamithra Iyer as our guest reviewer today. Sangamithra offers an insightful review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld.

by Sangamithra Iyer

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Joseph Lelyveld

In 1893, a young Indian lawyer arrived on the shores of South Africa. He didn’t know then that he would stay for over twenty years, during which he would be confronted with injustices that would force him to continually challenge not only the law, but also himself. Nor did he know that what he learned in South Africa he would later adapt to a struggle for independence and equity in his home country. The opening pages of Joseph Lelyveld’s book, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India , provide a portrait of this activist as a young man:

“He wants his life to matter, but he’s not sure where or how; in that sense, like most twenty-three-year-olds, he’s vulnerable and unfinished. He’s looking for something—a career, a sanctified way of life, preferably both—on which to fasten.”

Despite what the title may suggest, Great Soul is not hagiography, documenting the life of a saint, but rather a well-examined account of the making of an activist. In a recent talk at the Asia Society in New York, Lelyveld was asked what gave him the nerve to choose Gandhi as his subject, when the Mahatma is such a big figure and the literature on him is already so vast. “There’s a Sanskrit word for it,” Lelyveld joked. “ Chutzpah. ”

Indeed there is a certain amount of chutzpah required to re-examine a well examined life, but Great Soul succeeds in tracking Gandhi’s work in South Africa and analyzing how it shaped the man who would become a national and moral leader in India. It is well researched and artfully guided by Lelyveld, who spent decades studying Gandhi’s life and letters, tracing his footsteps on both continents. What I appreciated about the book is its intimate portrayal of a very human, flawed and conflicted Gandhi — a man trying to find his way to change the world.

My interest in Gandhi is multifold. My grandfather was an engineer working for the British in Burma when he responded to Gandhi’s call for activists in the struggle for independence. He rid himself of worldly possessions and started a Gandhian ashram in a rural village in south India, where my father was born. I was always fascinated by Gandhi’s connection of the personal to the political and inspired by his example to “be the change you wish to see in the world.” In Great Soul , I found an account of Gandhi’s life that wasn’t simplified or glorified, but instead addressed the complexity of the activist and his work.

While Gandhi’s thoughts on vegetarianism and animal related issues are barely and only peripherally touched upon in Great Soul — (see Gandhi’s Autobiography and Tristram Stuart’s Bloodless Revolution for more on these topics) — Lelyveld’s documentation of Gandhi’s social justice work provides valuable insight and perspective to animal activists.

Indeed, in the Bloodless Revolution , Stuart notes that “vegetarianism was Gandhi’s first political cause; many of his earliest writings were articles in the journals of the Vegetarian Society [of London] and correspondences about his new vegetarian ‘mission.’” He never abandoned this seminal cause (and in fact was continually refining it), but he connected it to other efforts that eventually led to his role in Indian independence.

The Power of the Pen

When Gandhi moved to South Africa, his first activist deed was a letter to the editor. It was after he had been ordered by a judge to remove his turban in a courtroom in Durban, and the local newspaper published an article about the situation titled “An Unwelcome Visitor.” Lelyveld writes that “Gandhi immediately shot off a letter to the newspaper, the first of dozens he’d write to deflect or deflate white sentiments.” After his next racial assault, when he was ejected from a train’s first-class compartment because a white passenger did not want to be in the same area as a “coolie,” Gandhi sent telegrams to the general manager of the railway station raising enough of a ruckus to reboard the train in first class. (Later in his life in India, he would voluntarily only travel third class in solidarity with the masses).

In South Africa, Gandhi needed a platform, so he launched his own weekly newspaper, Indian Opinion . In need of a name for his nonviolent movement, because he felt “passive resistance” indicated a certain weakness, he held a contest in Indian Opinion . Through that process, the name satyagraha — truth force — was coined.

As is the case with all independent media, funding became a concern. Inspired by reading John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi “found an answer to his immediate practical problem: he could save his paper by moving it to a self-sustaining rural settlement,” Lelyveld writes. “Workers on the farm were expected to double as pressmen and simultaneously feed themselves. Hand labor, thereafter, would be the reflexive Gandhian answer to various problems from colonial exploitation to rural underemployment and poverty.”

As a result, for Gandhi, the publication was not only a pulpit but became a way to show how he was practicing what he preached. A compilation of his columns from Indian Opinion would later become his Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Upon his return to India, Gandhi started another publication, Young India , and later while in prison, distributed The Harijan , a weekly newsletter aimed at getting rid of the caste system.

Coalition Building

Gandhi was not a single-issue advocate. His views and philosophies were ever evolving but he understood the connections between all his causes, even when few others did. Lelyveld analyzes Gandhi’s work on his “four pillars” for swaraj (self-rule): Hindu Muslim unity, eradication of untouchability, revitalization of self-sustaining rural villages, and ahimsa , nonviolence. When I think about my grandfather’s work in the Freedom Movement, what it entailed was spinning cotton, providing water and sanitation to rural villages and fighting for caste equality. These tasks epitomized Gandhi’s pillars in function and in form.

Pyarelal, one of Gandhi’s biographers, documented one of his epiphanies in South Africa that ultimately led to the four pillars:

“The truth burst upon his heart with the force of the revelation that so long as India allowed a section of her people to be treated as pariahs, so long must her sons be prepared to be treated as pariahs abroad.”

In India, Gandhi expanded his thinking further: “Only at that time can non-cooperation with an enemy nation become a possibility, when full cooperation between ourselves has been achieved.”

Working towards these goals had its challenges, and Gandhi was subject to a fair amount of criticism. He needed to fight untouchability in Hinduism yet still maintain a Hindu base for the independence movement and build that base without alienating Muslims in the process. Lelyveld poses the questions Gandhi faced:

“Could he simultaneously lead a struggle for independence and a struggle for social justice if that meant taking on orthodox high-caste Hindus, which would inevitably strain and possibly splinter his movement?… Granted that Gandhi did much to make the practice of untouchability disreputable among modernizing Indians, what exactly was he prepared to do for the untouchables themselves besides preach to their oppressors?”

As he struggled with these issues and his approach to addressing them, one thing Gandhi was sure of was nonviolence:

“I personally can never be a party to a movement half-violent and half non-violent,” he said, “even though it may result in the attainment of so-called swaraj, for it will not be real swaraj as I have conceived it.”

Gandhi’s ruminations on building bridges within and between movements and defining tactics and strategies must surely echo and resonate among animal activists today. They remind us that every movement for change has had strong dissension within its ranks and that without constant care and thoughtful leadership, could easily be torn apart.

On Despair:

Despite the many challenges facing him and India, Gandhi once said he was “not a quick despairer.” But there were moments when Gandhi realized, that despite his efforts, the four pillars to which he devoted his life were crumbling. Lelyveld writes about a very lonely and disappointed Gandhi when violence erupted around him:

“For India’s prophet of unity, nonviolence, and peace, these events—the overture for a year and a half of mass mayhem, murder, forced migration, property loss on a vast scale, extensive ethnic cleansing—provided ample reason for despair, enough to bring his whole life into question. Or so he seemed to feel at his lowest ebb. But if he was shaken, he clung ever more fervently to his core value of ahimsa, on which much of India seemed to have given up.”

Lelyveld captures the personal struggle Gandhi faced, committing himself to a life of activism. In 1921, Gandhi thought independence could be achieved in one year. And when independence came in 1947, it was heartbreaking. Gandhi witnessed the partition of his homeland, what he referred to as “vivisection.”

“The tragic element is that he was ultimately forced like Lear, to see the limits of his ambition to remake his world,” Lelyveld explains. And yet, Gandhi non-violently soldiered on. He veered at the end of his life, Lelyveld observes “between dark despair and irrepressible hope.”

Satyagraha Now

Lelyveld points out that in South Africa today, “the vegetarian restaurant, steps away [from Gandhi’s law office] is long gone; hard by the place it stood, perhaps exactly on the spot, a McDonald’s now does a fairly brisk nonvegetarian trade.” And in India, Lelyveld writes, “The combination of piety and disregard [for Gandhi]—hardly unique to India—lasted as a cultural reflex surviving the explosion of India’s first nuclear bomb.”

When President Obama traveled to India last fall, he paid his respects to Gandhi’s memorial, but arrived with an economic agenda offering American meat, dairy and arms to the emerging superpower . Globalization, urbanization and modernization have shaped an India that is far removed from Gandhi’s vision of self-sustaining villages. Religious conflict and social inequality still plague India today.

What we may see now almost anywhere is not too dissimilar to what Gandhi discovered when he returned to India in 1915 and what ultimately drove his work. “I see around me on the surface nothing but hypocrisy, humbug and degradation, and yet underneath it, I trace a divinity.” We may be witnessing the erosion of Gandhian principles, but also their reincarnation. Perhaps it is in the nonviolent resistance movements in the Middle East, undercover investigations exposing the truth about how animals are treated, DIY efforts of self-sufficiency, or any time individuals realize that change begins with them, we find a trace of the Mahatma.

*** Sangamithra Iyer is an Associate for Brighter Green and the former Assistant Editor of Satya Magazine.

Sangamithra Iyer

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Book Review: Hind Swaraj by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Sidhartha yadav.

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The ‘HIND SWARAJ’ by M.K. Gandhi is a monumental work in Philosophy of civilization. It is a critique of civilization. Gandhi has given incisive criticism of up-to-date civilization, unfortunately this leaflet has not drawn attention of philosophers because it ought to have done. Gandhi wasn’t solely a good politico; however, a thinker and a critic of up-to-date civilization Gandhi's criticism of contemporary civilization might seem dogmatic, strange and extremely uncommon on the surface, all the same through his criticism Gandhi paves the approach for a brand-new social order. Gandhi may be thought to be a social thinker Like all different classical philosopher, he presents before us a vision of man and society. The 'Hind Swaraj• can be regarded as the 'Bible of Gandhian Thought'. This book, as a matter of truth contains the primary formulation of his ideas. Even twenty to thirty years after its publication he didn’t want it form any modification in It except a word here and a word there. Rather he declared that he had for the duration of tried to measure in keeping with the principles enunciated in this book. However, the most important objective of the book was to supply a critique of western civilization. By approach of providing a critique of western civilization, Gandhi in this book tried to stipulate the principles of recent civilization, that he hoped can make individual and social life worthy of existence. Gandhi's thoughts concerning politics, religion. faith etc. are enshrined in this book. This booklet was originally published in Gujrati in 1908 and later on translated into English. Although thin in size, the Hind Swaraj, is admittedly the work of art of Gandhi’s thoughts. His later thoughts may be derived back in Its germinal type to this book. His later thoughts owe their origin to the 'Hind Swaraj, Philosophy, as is known now-a-days within the Anglo-American world stands for logical ideas, concepts or categories. It is construed as a critique of language, thought or communication. this type of variety of expounding owes its origin in the main to the logical positivists. The positivists claimed that philosophy cannot study reality or the globe directly. Philosophy doesn’t offer us any positive data or information concerning the world. Its sole task is to dispel or remove away ambiguities and unclearness.

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International Journal of Law Management and Humanities, Volume 4, Issue 4, Page 1487 - 1492

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