In this paragraph lie the roots of the revolutionary sections in the Constitution of India which mandated equal citizenship in a soil and social climate so massively steeped in caste (and gender) inequality.
When some conservatives justified the pernicious practice of Untouchability by saying they were sanctioned by the scriptures, Gandhi replied:
If I discovered those scriptures which are known as Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavadgita, Smritis, etc, clearly showed that they claim divine authority for untouchability … then nothing on this earth would hold me to Hinduism. I should overthrow it overboard as I should overthrow a rotten apple.
Elsewhere, Gandhi remarked that ‘every religious principle claiming authority from the Shastras should be tested on the anvil of truth with the hammer of compassion’. Truth and compassion led Gandhi to promote campaigns of temple-entry, so as to demonstrate that all were equal in the eyes of God; and, in time, to advocate inter-marriage between Dalits and savarnas, thereby undermining a crucial building block of the caste system.
While serving time in the prisons of the Raj, Gandhi had made himself better acquainted with the Vedas and the Puranas. However, the one sacred text he seriously read and identified with was the Bhagavad Gita. With characteristic originality, Gandhi ignored or finessed the element of bhakti in the Gita—as in its call to venerate the avatar Krishna—in favour of an action-oriented understanding of its message. He focused on some select verses of Chapter II of the Gita, which spoke of ethical conduct, and which celebrated (in Jordens’s paraphrase) the stable, serene human being ‘who has gained a complete mastery over feelings of attachment, aversion, love, lust, and hate, who cannot be swayed by his outer senses or his imagination, who has an attitude of total indifference to all that may please or displease him’.
Many Hindus have a transactional attitude towards religion, going to temples and shrines to pray for the birth of a (male) child, for good grades in their examinations, etc. Gandhi himself meditated in the mornings and evenings, and held communal prayer meetings in his ashrams. Prayer and the singing of hymns were for him an aid to acquiring composure and serenity. He emphatically rejected the idea that one should, or could, beg or demand favours from God. ‘Divinity is in everyone and everything,’ he once remarked, ‘and the meaning of prayer is that I want to invoke that Divinity within me.’
For Gandhi, chastity and fasting were practices that were the core components of the ethical—and religious—life. Jordens traces, with sympathy but not uncritically, Gandhi’s experiments with celibacy, from his abandonment of sexual relations with his wife in South Africa in 1906 to his late, controversial experiments in sleeping naked beside young women in the 1940s. He also closely studies Gandhi’s resort to fasting at times of personal or political crisis. When confronted with dissidence (or worse) within his ashram, or with caste and religious violence in society at large, Gandhi undertook fasts that some saw as coercive but which he himself claimed were acts of self-purification. Fasting, he said, ‘quickens the spirit of prayer’; a fast was a ‘spiritual act and, therefore, addressed to God’. Some of his fasts were remarkably efficacious, and not just for him, accomplishing what the long arm of the law and the massed power of the state could not—namely, persuade (or shame) warring hordes of Hindus and Muslims to put down their weapons and make peace with one another.
Gandhi’s interpretation and practice of his ancestral faith was unorthodox, heterodox, and even perhaps heretical. To achieve and realize his peculiar, even unique, form of Hinduism, he had to wage a series of arduous struggles: against orthodox Hindus, who hated him, and even sought to assassinate him for daring to challenge the practice of Untouchability; against his fellow Congressmen, who wondered why Gandhi did not focus exclusively on political freedom instead of taking these—to them—unnecessary detours into temple-entry and the like; against his closest followers in the ashram, who erratically and sometimes sullenly followed his teachings with regard to sex, diet, health, and manual labour; and against himself, as he tested the limits of his physical and emotional endurance through his experiments with celibacy and through his fasts. Gandhi’s independence and courage in this regard were to some others merely stubbornness and pig-headedness. But in his pursuit of what he saw as the truth, he was never to be shaken by criticism, even that offered by his family and his closest friends. He was always, in the words of the Tagore song, prepared to walk alone.
Gandhi’s religious faith was hard-won—the result of his own exertions and experiences, rather than of received wisdom or ancient texts. In an illuminating passage, Jordens says that while the teachings of a learned philosopher, such as Shankara, could be compared to a ‘beautifully woven tapestry, extremely complex, where every colour and every thread takes its proper place in a symphonic whole’, the spiritual synthesis Gandhi arrived at was more ‘like a large, bulky, woollen shawl. At first it looks very plain to the eye, but we can detect the beauty of the strong patterns and the contrasting shades of folk art. With its knots and unevenness, it feels at first rough to the touch; but soon we can experience how effective it is in warming cold and hungry limbs.’
Among the conventional or traditional Hindu, religious devotion is expressed through the scrupulous observance of rituals, the loving and intense adoration of a personal or family God, or a deep knowledge of the scriptures—or all of the above. On the other hand, the essence of Gandhi’s faith consisted of a commitment to truth, chastity, non-violence, and, especially, service. As Jordens writes, ‘no school of sect [within Hinduism] did ever elevate the activity of service itself into one that caused the realisation of moksha’—which is what Gandhi did.
In 1936, Gandhi moved to a small hamlet in central India which he renamed Sevagram—the Village of (and for) Service. Gandhi told a friend that he had come here to find
self-realisation through the service of these village folk. Man’s ultimate aim is the realisation of God, and all his activities, social, political, religious, have to be guided by the ultimate aim of the vision of God. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary part of the endeavour simply because the only way to find God is to see Him in His creation and to be one with it. This can only be done by service of all … I am part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find him apart from the rest of humanity … If I could persuade myself that I should find Him in a Himalayan cave, I would proceed there immediately. But I know that I cannot find Him apart from humanity.
For all his departures from scripture and his battles with the orthodox, Gandhi still called himself a Hindu, indeed even a ‘sanatani’ Hindu. Why was this? Was this out of sentimental attachment to an ancestral faith, or for tactical reasons, since positioning himself as an outsider would make it harder to persuade other Hindus of his arguments? Be that as it may, aspects of Gandhi’s faith resonate closely with spiritual (or intellectual) traditions that are other than ‘Hindu’. The stress on ethical conduct brings him close to Buddhism, while the avowal of non-violence and non-possession is clearly drawn from Jainism. The exaltation of service is far more Christian than Hindu. The emphasis on the dignity of the individual echoes Enlightenment ideas of human rights.
Gandhi had lived in the West, been mentored by a Jain, and had close friends who were Christian or Buddhist. His faith synthesized these varied encounters and experiences. If he still insisted on seeing himself as a ‘Hindu’, we should respect his self-assessment, noting only that his was a Hinduism that was massively individual and decidedly idiosyncratic, in a word, ‘home-spun’.
IV
If Jordens’s study is the best book-length work on Gandhi’s place in the history of modern Hinduism, the most original short treatment of the subject is the last chapter of a now-forgotten primer published in 1962 by a now-forgotten (but in his lifetime very well-known) scholar named R.C. Zaehner. Zaehner was Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s successor as Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions at All Souls College, Oxford. Like his predecessor he was a polymathic non-specialist w
ho wrote prodigiously on very many topics and themes.
The last chapter of Zaehner’s Hinduism is called ‘Yudhisthira’s Return’. This innovatively—and to my mind, convincingly—compares the great leader of Indian nationalism to the eldest of the five Pandava brothers. Gandhi, writes Zaehner, was ‘in history what King Yudhisthira was in myth, the conscience of Hinduism that hungers and thirsts after righteousness in defiance of the letter of the law of gods and men’.
Gandhi is hailed as the Father of the Nation; yet, as Zaehner reminds us, he ‘did not see himself primarily as the architect of Indian independence from British rule but as the liberator of the Indian spirit from the fetters of greed and anger, hatred and despair’. Gandhi was ‘the greatest reformer Hinduism has seen’. He transformed his faith, and very many of the faithful, by defining dharma, or righteousness, in terms of conscience and compassion, rather than by what was said in the sacred texts. Thus in his battle against Untouchability, Gandhi was moved, inspired and directed not by ‘the dharma of the law-books and Brahmans, but the dharma that rests on ahimsa, truth, renunciation, passionlessness, and an equal love for all God’s creatures …’
Both Yudhisthira and Gandhi, notes R.C. Zaehner, saw themselves as failures for being unable to prevent fratricidal warfare, between Pandavas and Kauravas in the one case, and between Hindus and Muslims in the other. Yet ‘both were yet triumphant, for both had been true to themselves, to conscience, to Truth, to the sanatana dharma as they saw it in themselves, and therefore to God’.
V
Jordens and Zaehner both focus on how Gandhi understood, refined and revised Hindu thought and practice. They trace, with sympathy and insight, his career as a heterodox/unorthodox/reforming/radical interpreter of his own religious tradition. In this concluding section, I shall stress rather what Gandhi’s faith meant for, or means to, those who are themselves not Hindus. Here, one might foreground five crucial elements of Gandhi’s religious ecumenism:
First, Gandhi rejected the idea that there was one privileged path to God. Second, he believed that all religious traditions were an unstable mixture of truth and error. From these two beliefs followed the third, which was that Gandhi rejected conversion and missionary work. Fourth, Gandhi advocated that a human being should stick to the religion he or she was born into, and seek to improve its ‘truth content’. Fifth, Gandhi encouraged inter-religious dialogue, so that individuals could see their faith in the critical reflections of another.
Gandhi once said of his own faith that he had ‘broaden[ed] my Hinduism by loving other religions as my own’. One of his notable innovations was the inter-faith prayer meeting, where texts of different religions were read and sung to a mixed audience. At an International Fellowship of Religions, held at Sabarmati in January 1928, he said, ‘We can only pray, if we are Hindus, not that a Christian should become a Hindu, or if we are Mussalmans, not that a Hindu or a Christian should become a Mussalman, nor should we even secretly pray that anyone should be converted [to our faith], but our inmost prayer should be that a Hindu should be a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim and a Christian a better Christian. That is the fundamental truth of fellowship.’
What does it mean to be a better Hindu, or Muslim, or Christian? The sacred texts of all religions have contradictory trends and impulses; sometimes sanctioning one thing, at other times its opposite. Gandhi urged that we recover and reaffirm those trends that oppose violence and discrimination while promoting justice and non-violence. The Shankaracharyas claimed that Untouchability was sanctioned by the Shastras; Gandhi answered that in that case the Shastras did not represent the true traditions (or real intentions) of Hinduism. Islamic texts might speak of women in condescending or disparaging terms in one place and in terms of reverence and respect in another; surely, a Muslim committed to justice would value the second above the first? Likewise, a Christian must privilege the pacifism of Jesus’s life above the passages in the Bible calling for revenge and retribution against people of other faiths.
While he lived, there were three groups of Indians that most vocally opposed Gandhi’s religious views. First, there were the secular socialists, who saw Gandhi’s faith as superstition, as a throwback to a backward, medieval age. Second, there were the Muslim politicians, who saw his talk of religious harmony as a cloak and cover for his essentially Hindu interest. Third, there were the extremists of his own religion, who saw Gandhi’s talk of inter-faith dialogue as a denial of the Hindu essence of the Indian nation. It was a member of this third tendency, Nathuram Godse, who murdered the Mahatma on the 30th of January 1948.
There was, in Gandhi’s life and work, an inseparable bond between non-violence and religious pluralism. When, in the late 1930s, violent conflicts erupted between Jewish settlers and Palestinian peasants, with both sides claiming to act in the name of their faith, Gandhi remarked that ‘a religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb’. A decade later, aged seventy-seven, Gandhi walked through the riot-torn districts of eastern Bengal, healing the wounds. When independence came to India the following August, Gandhi refused to celebrate, for political freedom had come on the back of sectarian violence. Since the violence would not abate, Gandhi began a fast-unto-death in Calcutta. His act shocked and shamed the people of the city, who came around, slowly. A group of representative Hindus and Muslims met him with a written promise ‘that peace and quiet have been restored in Calcutta once again’. The undertaking added: ‘We shall never again allow communal strife in the city. And shall strive unto death to prevent it.’
Gandhi now called off his fast, and proceeded to Delhi. The Muslims of this city had been savagely attacked by Hindus and Sikhs, themselves inflamed by pogroms against their co-religionists in Pakistan. Gandhi abhorred this politics of revenge and retribution. He went on another fast in protest. His health rapidly declined. He was persuaded to break his fast after an all-party delegation pledged that ‘we shall protect the life, property and faith of Muslims and that the incidents which have taken place in Delhi will not happen again’.
An old, frail man had, by the force of moral example, helped bring peace to two very large cities. He now wished to proceed to the Punjab, where the rioting had been especially fierce. Before he could go, he was murdered by a religious fanatic. But his example, and achievements, lie before us. For, like the late nineteenth century, the early twenty-first century has also seen a renewal of an arrogant atheism on the one side and of religious bigotry on the other. Bookshops are awash with titles proclaiming that God does not exist; and the streets are muddied and bloodied by battles and wars between competing fundamentalisms.
Thirty years after I argued with him, I can see that Ramu Gandhi was even more right than he knew. One cannot, as the philosopher cautioned me, understand the Mahatma without paying proper attention to his religious beliefs and practices. But Gandhi’s faith was and is relevant not merely to himself. It may be of vital assistance in promoting peace and harmony between people who worship different Gods or no God at all. Back in 1919, while seeking to forge an entente cordiale between India’s two major religious groupings, Gandhi asked them to collectively take this vow:
With God as witness we Hindus and Mahomedans declare that we shall behave towards one another as children of the same parents, that we shall have no differences, that the sorrows of each will be the sorrows of the other and that each shall help the other in removing them. We shall respect each other’s religion and religious feelings and shall not stand in the way of our respective religious practices. We shall always refrain from violence to each other in the name of religion.
It only remains for me to add: what Gandhi asked of Hindus and Muslims in India in 1919 should be asked again of them today; asked also of Jews and Arabs in Palestine, of Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka, and of Christians and Muslims in Europe, North America, West Asia, and West and East Africa.
Chapter Seven
Verdicts on Nehru: The Rise and Fall of a Reputation
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I
The first photograph I remember seeing was of Jawaharlal Nehru. He was wearing a white Gandhi cap, and a white waistcoat with a red rose over its left pocket.
The photo hung over my parents’ bed in our home in Dehradun. My mother worshipped Nehru. When he visited our town in the aftermath of the China War of 1962, she went to hear him speak, and was so moved by his words that she donated her gold bangles to the National Defence Fund, an act of spontaneous patriotism that was derided, for years afterwards, in our extended family. That was exactly how pragmatic, prudent Tamil Brahmin women were not supposed to behave.
A decade before the China War, Nehru was speaking in another town roughly the size of Dehradun, albeit in a very different part of the country. Seeking votes for his Congress party in the first-ever General Elections, Nehru came, in January 1952, to Kharagpur, a railway town in West Bengal with a very mixed and diverse population. In the crowd to hear him speak were a group of Telugu-speaking women. As Nehru sonorously urged his fellow citizens to place their faith in his party, which was the legatee of the freedom movement and all that it stood for, one of the Andhra women began to experience labour pains. At once, her colleagues formed a protective ring around her. With one ear cocked to what their leader was saying, they successfully delivered the baby. The sources don’t say what the sex of this new Indian citizen was; were it male, odds-on that it was named Jawaharlal.
Women adored Jawaharlal Nehru—Brahmin women, working-class women, Hindu and Muslim and Christian and Parsi women. When Nehru was in his pomp, very many Indian men admired him too. Take your mind further back a decade, to the early days of that momentous year in Indian history, 1942. Mahatma Gandhi had convened a meeting of the Congress Working Committee at his ashram in Wardha. These were very troubled times, with the world at war, and India still denied its freedom. After the meeting ended, Jawaharlal Nehru prepared to catch the train back to his home town, Allahabad. As he turned to leave, Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, wished him Godspeed. (The account we have of this encounter is in English—she probably said, in Hindustani, ‘Ishwar tera saath dé.’) At the mention of the Almighty the socialist and radical exploded. What kind of God is this, said Nehru, who allows a barbarous war, who permits the gassing of the Jews, who encourages the predations of imperialism and colonialism? There was a hushed and appalled silence all around. For, no self-described follower of Gandhi had ever spoken so harshly to the revered old lady, who was, in a manner of speaking, the Mother of the Nation-in-the-Making. The situation was retrieved by the Mahatma. ‘Let Jawaharlal be, Ba,’ he remarked, ‘despite what he has just said, he is closer to God than any of us.’