GIRMITYAS’ GIFTS TO MAHATMA GANDHI
GANDHI’S STRATEGIES DID NOT END ALL WARS BUT THEY DID SHOW THE IMMEASURABLE POSSIBILITIES WITHIN THE HUMAN SOUL
He believed only in one war: the struggle between good and evil, love and hate, in the recesses of the human heart.
■Emeritus Professor Satendra Nandan’s book Gandhianjali was published in Fiji and Canberra marking the celebration of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary. Satendra has been given an award to write a book on Gandhi’s life and his unique friendship with Rev C F Andrews for Australasian readers.
In these traumatic times, one remembers individuals who give us leadership of courage and comfort, healing and hope.
Leadership, like poetry, is difficult to define but one can identify it, recognise and respect its quality of humanity from any part of the world.
And feel its living presence daily: in words, acts, pictures, thoughts and that most precious entity called life. Its magical mystery is part of our existential, human condition. It is the One that adds value to every zero. Leadership is seen in ‘great’ men and women as well as in the kindness and generosity of ‘ordinary’ people who provide us with their heroic efforts so that we’ve food on our tables, who look after the sick and the aged as nurses and medics in hospitals, in old people’s homes and hospices.
They are the firefighters in the frontline.
COVID-19 has brought out the extraordinary acts of generosity in millions of ordinary individuals. They seem to be guided by an inner light they carry within them of suffering like a Diwali flame that lights the wick of compassion in unlit lamps. It’s only a lighted candle that can light another.
If there’s a pandemic of fear in many, there’s also a pandemic of kindness that I see daily in numerous acts of caring and community obligations. The buses run and the trains are on time.
COVID-19 has taught us one fundamental truth: there are no certitudes in human life and on our planet. And this is not a national disease but a planetary scourge. Here, there are no borders, no boundaries of any kind and it attacks most fiercely, often fatally, our respiratory organs. Of any race or religion.
Without our breath what are we? We become equal, however, briefly in our transient world. Shipwrecked but together.
Leaders
Recently a most remarkable leader has emerged from our region: the NZ prime-minister Jacinda Ardern comes easily to mind with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, and
Justin Trudeau of Canada. They shine out like flashes of lightning from the thunderous clouds that hover over our heads in various forms of viruses and vices of many kinds, often without kindness.
These leaders have shown immense empathy for the people of their nations and beyond to help those who need assistance. Noone, they have shown, is expendable and everyone is dear to somebody. Their message is simple and universal: Take care o f yourselves and all you care for. And inspire others with your voices of concern and acts of compassion.
The irony of historical events
In these despairing days, the man I find most inspiring is Mohandas Gandhi, with his gentle humour, deep humility and an unfathomable humanity, almost Christ-like. His goodness spreads like the rippling waves of an ocean or the rays of a rising sun. Gandhi of course brought a vivisected freedom to India: he couldn’t win against powerful forces arrayed by his co-religionists and an imperial Britain who thought the partition of India was desirable as the Cold War was looming across a broken and war-ravaged Europe.
Both the Holocaust and Hiroshima are part of that experience in the lifetime of many of us.
But Gandhi lived through them all, including the partitions of his heart and three bullets in his body.
His greatest gift was to free the Indian mind from fear. He made ordinary mortals fearless: peaceful fighters for many freedoms and when he turned the torch inwards to a caste-ridden, sectarian subcontinent, he was assassinated.
Such is the irony of historical events. But they do illuminate our present realities with a revenant wisdom and light in which we may see ourselves a bit more clearly like the debris seen floating in the river of life in the flashes of lightning in a storm.
An English man in imitation
The wonder of it all is that the man who became a mahatma was a mediocre student, a failed lawyer, a domineering husband, a man scared of the dark and indifferent to the ills of his community with its fads and fantasies.
But he lived by the Arabian Sea. Porbandar, where he was born, in a small, seaside town. The sea and the setting sun must have given him some sense of another world beyond his immediate shores.
He was determined to go to England
Migrants
to study: he left, aged 18, despite being excommunicated by his caste-obsessed clan.
In London, he tried to be an Englishman in imitation. But he also read the Gita in translation and works of Ruskin and Tolstoy, and made some remarkable friends.
But it is only when he went to South Africa that something life-changing happened. It’s here that he moved towards greatness, among indentured men and women, and small merchants, with the help of Jews, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Parsis and Chinese.
He was not too sensitive to the plight of the native people though he saved many lives during the Zulu-Boer wars as a medical nurse and a leader of stretcher bearers--he was given a medal for his efforts during those brutal conflicts.
He saw suffering at close quarters and what racial brutalities did to other human beings long before it culminated in Hitler’s Holocaust or religious fanaticism in India, the beloved country o his birth. Last week, April 29 was the day, 250 years ago, when Captain James Cook arrived on the shores of Australia. Few migrants know the consequences of this ‘invasion’ and its many massacres of an ancient people. Controversies rage whether January 26 should be celebrated as Australia Day when, in 1788, the first settlement was established on the island continent at Sydney Cove, after Cook’s ‘discovery’.
Coincidentally January 26 is also India’s Republic Day. But by the time India became a sovereign, secular, socialist Republic, Gandhi had been dead for five years.
My current interest is really to see how Gandhiji became what he became. For that South Africa is creatively critical: Winston Churchill, General Jan Smuts, Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela come easily to mind associated with this most tragic of places.
It’s true that Gandhi, the lawyer, was initially interested in the Indian migrants and merchants living in a corner of this mighty continent known for adventure, exploitation and slavery. But Gandhi believed if he carved first among these stranded Indians a path in this forest of racial prejudices and subjugation, others may follow with their own strength and communal resources.
It took another century before Nelson Mandela became the first genuinely democratically elected president of South Africa, with the help of South African Indians and India.
Life’s mission
Gandhi’s battles were bigger: first he had to ‘fight’ violence and show nonviolence as the true weapon of human beings.
His belief in satyagraha became the most potent and protean weapon of the powerless.
No-one had ever tried this weapon on such a scale against most ruthless powers. That Gandhi succeeded in South Africa remains the miracle of the most imperial 19th century. For this he’s often mentioned with the Buddha and Christ.
Gandhi’s world was different though and he was not seeking nirvana or salvation but freedom from fear set free for all the peoples of the world bound in chains of infinite injustice. Human love was the essence of his efforts. And Truth was his only God. It was a celestial message that he found in the Gita and the Sermon on the Mount: action and contemplation; words and silence.
He went to South Africa in 1893 and stayed on for 21 years.
His struggles there constituted one of the most glorious episodes in history, as ordinary men and women, with rudimentary learning, and scant material resources became morally energized to confront racial evil in law and in life.
He found his true vocation among the indentured and the exiled.
In the process he was himself transformed: he had come to South Africa as a diffident boy-lawyer but by the time he left, after a couple of eventful decades, he had become an inspiring international leader of the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, the displaced.
It’s among the lowliest and the lost that he discovered his life’s mission. And when he tried to reform the barbaric system inherited from India’s caste-corrupted past, he lost his life at the hand of a high-caste assassin.
Gandhi’s strategies did not end all wars but they did show the immeasurable possibilities within the human soul. And that one person can make a difference to humanity. To think he was able to release this potential among the ‘girmit’ people is one of the wonders of our modern history with its multifarious problems and conflicts.
But he believed only in one war: the struggle between good and evil, love and hate, in the recesses of the human heart.
All wars begin in the minds of men, and some women.
They should end there, too, especially when COVID-19 is hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles held by a hair’s breadth.
Like the fragility of human breath itself. But nothing is more precious in Life.
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