GANDHI’S 150TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY
An edited version of a keynote talk given at the international Gandhi Symposium in July at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture,Canberra, to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). Professor Nandan’s book Gandhianjali was published in July and launched in Canberra
WE often walk on the footprints of others. Pietermaritzburg, near Durban, on the night of 7 June 1893, was cold and dimly lit. A young lawyer, little more than a boy, London-trained, dressed like a pompous legal eagle, colonially educated to serve the Empire, is removed, with racial arrogance, out of his first class compartment. His luggage lay strewn on the darkened platform. But there was no room for him in the compartment.
He’d a first class ticket for that first class compartment, paid for by a couple of businessmen. Mohandas Gandhi was more than shocked; but before his faith in British fairness and the rule of law was shattered ,a white stranger came and took him into the waiting room of that non-descript railway station.
The train receded into the intensifying darkness of South Africa. Sometimes on the wrong train, you reach the right station in life. As Albert Einstein, Gandhi’s contemporary, said: God is subtle but never sinister.
It was the young stranger’s longest journey in a strange land. He found some warmth in another stranger’s company.
After a restless night, morning came to consciousness; a new awareness dawned on the young lawyer’s mind: to return or to resist?
Gandhi ,after years, called that incident the most creative moment in his life. It was truly momentous. And transformative for the most militarily powerful Empire and a young lawyer.
Gandhi was barely 23 years old. We’re told Jesus was crucified at 33.
Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, barely six months after India gained her independence-he hadn’t joined in the celebrations; he wanted a creative interdependence between a united Britain and an undivided India.
Instead the subcontinent was brutally vivisected. It was for Gandhi the partition of the heart.
But the old man, just before dying, had saved millions of lives in Calcutta and Delhi through his acts of fasting and trudging barefoot in the killing jungles.
After that, at 78, he kept hoeing his garden of prayers in Delhi , almost like St Francis. Then he was fatally shot by a young Hindu.
After 1857 the subcontinent, always in a state of flux, was ruled by a handful of Britons with the help of Indians who perpetrated many atrocities.
This year, in April, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre commemorated its 100th anniversary: It was one of the worst killings of unarmed civilians in history. The soldiers who shot them almost all were Indians, British trained.
Gandhi claimed Truth is God-- the speaking tree of many branches which form the religious quests of humanity from the dawn of history.
But what is this tree of TRUTH?
Though leaves are many, the root is one:
Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth. This withering idea of Truth he tried to practice in his life and his politics. Think of his contemporaries and you get some idea of the challenges he faced: he was attempting to climb Mount Everest.
In his questioning essay ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, published soon after Gandhi’s assassination, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, concludes: ‘but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind.’
Or as Professor Albert Einstein wrote of his fellow traveller, both leaning towards infinity: Gandhi had demonstrated that a powerful human following can be assembled not only through the cunning game of the usual political manoeuvres and trickeries but through the cogent example of a morally superior conduct of life. In our time of utter moral decadence Gandhi was the only statesman to stand for a higher human relationship in the political sphere.
So is there any hope for us in a world that reminds us of Orwell’s two great novels: the current reality is stranger than fiction? Is this ‘our time of utter moral decadence’ ? Think of what that school girl said at the UN just this week. Gandhi knew you dream and die alone. And if lucky, you may utter just two words: Oh, God! with your last
breath.
Mohandas Gandhi’s life’s message has so many threads: he said just before dying: My life is my message. I saw it inscribed on the plinth of his statue in Pietermaritzburg, unveiled by Nelson Mandela, a century after he was thrown out of that train on that fateful journey.
Gandhi’s spiritual synthesis, wrote a scholar, ‘was more like a large, bulky, woolen 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.’
Today when we see truth mutilated, language distorted, power
abused, and alternative facts promulgated and the falsification of history strangling the cries of freedom with violence and violations under cultural jingoism from Tiananmen to Tibet, New Delhi to New York, Manus to Melbourne, Hong Kong to Saudi Arabia …?
One can add one’s own: from A-Z, Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
The world is what it is. And the silence of so many of us is deafening in the noisy march of material ugliness of our modern civilisation with catastrophic climatic consequences.
In a world so fraught with such deepening distress and despair, do Mohandas Gandhi’s non-violence and truth--as old as hills, he said-have any validity and value to our lives when the planet is threatened with death and life with extinction?
Can the healing fountains start in the human heart? Is there goodness in the heart of evil? Is the battle between good and evil or simply a lack of love: the foundational dharma on which our world revolves. Can violence be answered with violence-wouldn’t that be easy? Gandhi knew a thing or two about love and leadership: rather how you create leadership in positions of power. How in respecting the OTHER, your self-respect is enhanced. Leadership is not a mantle you put
on: it’s a garment that is created with many threads that bind a people, indeed entire nations, in a colourful binding vine which grows out of our image of God’s Truth but is rooted in the rag-bone of our body and being. And becoming: in the blossoms in the dust that walk on the unpaved streets.
The most creative ground is always beneath your feet. And often Gandhi walked barefoot.
For Gandhi, initially God was Truth; later he changed it to Truth is God. What precisely he meant by it is difficult to decipher but he did believe in it with the same faith that people believe in God -- the invisible, indivisible and indefinable but the presence runs through our breath until it becomes air.
Its force in the wind and waves blows away the mightiest empires and most brutal tyrants.
He called it satyagraha with ahimsa--love-in-action on the battlefield of life as envisioned in the world’s longest epic, the Mahabharata. We fight the battles within us, as the snaky coils of vaulting ambitions enclose us.
Each individual has a soul and it is the soul-force that the mahatma unleashed--the energy contained within atman, soul, is no less potent than in an atom.
Or the seed out of which grows a mighty baniyan tree sprouting new roots from broken boughs as our migrant nations show daily and migrants taste it in their daily bread. The world is based on the bedrock of satya or truth. How often we encounter this endless truth in our daily lives: the courage of ordinary people who save lives by their numerous acts.
Truth for Gandhi is that which IS like God IS. This is the one reality: the rest we see are a bit like the emperor’s new clothes.
Satyagraha is rooted in the soil of the soul. It is the soul force, or firmness in truth. But Gandhi’s truth does not acquiesce in injustice, or exploitation. It faces the evil without hatred and with greater love-this is the distinctive meaning Gandhi gave to it in the world of politics, and in his daily dealings.
I do not think anyone had used such a powerful weapon before in the coils and spoils of politics. And to prove his point, he was prepared to die for it: but never to kill for it.
Gandhi lived it in action and contemplation. He fasted often to save others from dying. His amazing grace was that he moved human hearts that responded so magnificently to his inner call. The still sad music of humanity he heard morphed into the still, small voice within him.
That really was the miracle. Is there space now for this kind and quality of satyagraha? Was Gandhi’s time less complex? Certainly there were fewer people on the planet. But the monsters were multiplying.
In his classic book Hind Swaraj, published 110 years ago and written in nine days on a ship,Gandhi writes ‘Men will not need the use of their hands and feet. They will press a button and it will meet their many needs.’
He saw these as signs and wonders of civilisational failure. This is what’s gone wrong, he argued, with representative democracy. When we allow others to make decisions on our behalf.
The process of freedom was controlled by machines: party machine, the bureaucratic machine, the money machine.
Citizens have become consumers and students our clients and customers.
And cities can be destroyed by pressing a button or two. Gandhi was not against machines; he was certainly for men and women and what they can do together with their strength of body, mind and soul. With their hands, spinning.
Nor was he just speaking truth to power for many of us regard politics and politicians ‘dirty’. We often blame them for most ills in our society. But look at the freedom we have: what do WE do with it?
Gandhi advocated a face-to-face political interaction. Of course for us today it’s become too demanding in a clash of fundamentalisms. When the creative power of human love in the heart of truth in a heartless world surrenders to falsehood or hollow miracles, we are all diminished.
Gandhi saw the universal in all and the spirit of Truth must include all with the same love that God has for all his creation. It is this truth, he says, that drew him into the politics of life.
Those who say politics has nothing to do with religion know neither for all human activity--from the meanest to the noblest-- must have a ring of truth to life.
All religions for him were true and bound humanity into one wholeness of existence, with the turbulence and majesty found in oceans when drops come together.
He saw waves as water but so is the sea.
And to realise this Truth, the only way is ahimsa--non-violence, love-in-action through satyagraha-truth-in-action. Ahimsa and satyagraha are big words containing multitudes of meanings and messages. Gandhi’s breath was for love and justice, freedom and fearlessness. Out of which man’s morality emerges and the nation’s imagination is ethically enriched,
exalted.
And human beings are ennobled and see that they are fragments of the same Light, under the same sun, walking on the same life-giving planet.
To be true, to be simple, to be pure and gentle of heart, to remain cheerful with a sense of humour and humility, to love life and not fear death , is the way to one’s Truth.
And it can be lived by individuals, if not followed by nation-states. It is Gandhiji’s Truth.
And it can be found closest to us: in our hearts, home and in our neighbours. It reveals itself in a simple handshake or a greeting: Bula or Namaste. Gandhi not only alchemised all these in a single personality; he showed, by his words and actions, the possibilities in every person. He was both an artist and a hero: but above all the holiness of his heart’s affections predominated. For this he used the only weapons he
possessed: WORDS.
‘His words’, someone said, ‘flow like a river’.
But how did the most ordinary of men become a mahatma?
When Gandhi left for England, at the age of 19, he was excommunicated by the elders of his caste and clan; he knew little about his scriptures; when he returned as a dandy lawyer, he was a professional failure.
Fortunately he got a small assignment in Natal where the so-called ‘Arab merchants’ from India were making money amongst the indentured labourers and native Africans and competing with White supremacists.
It is among these people, against overwhelming power of a racialpolitical culture that young Gandhi shaped and sharpened his unassailable weapon of satyagraha. So South Africa gave Gandhi a different sense of Indianness: not the Indianness of India oppressively camouflaged by caste and subjugated by the Raj. This amazing insight into double oppression he acquired pre-eminently in his exilic existence among the poorest of the poor. Richard Attenborough in his In
Search of Gandhi, written after the film Gandhi he made, says that he carried a single sentence for 20 years before he was able to make the film.
Then, I read, says the late brother of David Attenborough, something which knocked me for six : Gandhi was walking along the pavement in South Africa with a fellow Indian and two white South Africans were walking towards them. As was expected in those days, the early 1890s, the two Indians stepped into the gutter and the whites continued on the sidewalk. After they had passed, Gandhi turned to his companion and said, ‘It has always been a mystery to me’ – he wasn’t angry, he was expressing surprise – ‘it has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.’
I was thunderstruck by the extraordinary perception of this remark, made by a young Indian in South Africa at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three. Again it is in South Africa that he lived amongst Hindus, Jews, Jains, Christians, Muslims, Parsis in the same house, on the same Farms.
And he often writes with the brilliance of a multifaceted South African diamond demonstrating how carbon molecules together become diamonds under pressure. What South Africa gave him was a vision of public work, including political activism as the service of all humanity, rather than as a path to personal, or group advancement.
As man of his time who asked the deepest questions, he became a man of all times and all places. At Sabarmati Ashram, in an untidy bookstall I found a copy of John Briley’s Gandhi, The Screen Play, a book, containing the distillation of many of the most profound thoughts of Gandhi in lines of dialogue for the famous film.
After desperately searching for Gandhi in many books, Briley read what Gandhi himself had written in his moments of silence and solitude, in his soul’s sufferings.
Briley writes: this open, questing, unpretentious man began to unfold for me.
The well-springs of his courage, his humility, the humour, the compelling power of his sense of the human dilemma – a power which when allied to his striving for decency (and he would put it no higher) made devoted disciples of men as diverse as the cultured, literate Nehru, the cynical Patel . . . and the village peasant who had never been five miles from the mud-brick house where he was born.
In writing “Gandhi” I have tried to make real the brave, determined man I discovered and to show his unsentimental honesty about the complexity of men and his unshakeable belief that on balance they are marginally more inclined to good than evil . . . and that on that slight imbalance they can build and achieve and perhaps survive – even in a nuclear age.
The vital breath of Gandhi’s truth in illiberal nationalisms and prevalent populism is that he not only acquired ideas from many sources, but that he mingled with people of many faiths, colours, castes, creeds, and communities.
No Indian leader had his exilic experience of South Africa and London, before he returned to India, aged 46.
He had gone to South Africa as a lawyer; he returned to India as a
mahatma. THAT was the great gift from the ‘Dark Continent’ to one of the oldest civilisations!
It is this that gives him a unique vision with a universal voice; and when it’s combined with God’s truth, it moves mountains.
And he did move, or attempt to climb, many mountains of race, religion, ideology, ethnicity, among the poorest of the poor as he lived among ‘coolies’ and colonials, castes and communalisms, and participated in the lives of others. Women joined him both on his farms and in his movements of satyagraha. He was as affected by his many independent, brilliant female colleagues as he was by the Tamil women under indenture in Natal. They gave him strength and he writes that ‘his work would remain incomplete if the liberation of women were not part of his movement for freedom and self-respect’. Of course every outsider finally comes home: and he or she never ceases from explorations within. And because he delved deep in the ills of his society, he was finally killed in the garden of a rich man in the imperial city created by the Raj. ‘Our philosophical home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.’ This also demands a shift in our definition of identity and nationality, even a separation from our exclusive heritage. The concepts of national identity so common in the postcolonial world now seem inadequate: they served their purpose when the reaction was a rediscovery, and an assertion of meaning against the meaninglessness and denigration created by the conquistadors .
The vase was broken; it took greater love to put the pieces together, even if it remains a bit scarred.
But decolonising the imagination is the longest journey. And creativity is to think new ideas, new answers to old problems. More than most Gandhi understood that human creativity is most wonderfully rooted in substance, in the human body and spirit. And a tree can grow anywhere: on an island or an island-continent.
And a mahatma can be created in the darkest corners of Mother Earth.