Mahatma Gandhi’s Religion: Searching for the Great Soul
THE FOLLOWING IS FROM A PUBLIC LECTURE GIVEN BY EMERITUS PROFESSOR SATENDRA NANDAN, AT THE HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE, ANU, ON SEPTEMBER 30, 2022, IN THE SERIES
CHere even as far back as 1939 when Patrick White published his first novel Happy Valley, he chose an epigraph from a Gandhi essay on suffering written in 1922, exactly a century ago today – suffering is the recurring leitmotif of White’s subsequent great fiction and other writings.
anberra is a good place to begin a journey into Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s growth into a Mahatma: The Great Soul.
After all, he began his experiments in and with truth in South Africa – who knows truth may have found shelter under Uluru, the Southern Rock, bigger, older than any human heart.
Gandhi did believe in changing the landscape of the heart and soul. That he succeeded to an extraordinary extent, I think, is the miracle of the first half of the genocidal 20th century. Perhaps the most memorable and magnificent achievement of a single and singular soul through Satyagraha, the force in the firmness of truth.
The Mahatma was assassinated in New Delhi on 30 January, 1948, soon after a brutally partitioned India gained her independence from the British.
The vivisection, with the connivance of the imperial power, was bloody; historians have defined it as ‘the greatest imperial crime in history’.
It will be centuries before its true significance is seen and felt in the body-politics of generations yet unborn, beyond the broken shores and inner contours of the subcontinent.
The Mahatma was killed by a deluded youth barely six months later – three bullets in his frail body; two words on his lips. Ironically named Godse, the young man has been called a madman, an extremist, a terrorist, a murderer, a religious fanatic and a patriot.
Gandhi wouldn’t have used any of these terms for his hand was always uplifted over hate; he would have blamed himself for the violent act of Nathuram Godse.
And if he had survived, he would have quipped – you wasted two bullets too many, my friend! Excellence was not wasting anything.
Canberra connection
New Delhi was conceived almost at the same time as Canberra. Both cities grew out of the colonial imagination. Of course we all know the architect of Canberra had died a decade before in 1937 in Lucknow. Walter Burley Griffin’s grave is in that city, not far from New Delhi where the mahatma was murdered.
But for our purpose tonight there are other connections. Gandhi in his long life of struggles and failures, trials and triumphs, fasts and fads, complexities and contradictions, amidst colonial cruelties and caste’s staggering injustice, communal atrocities and racial brutalities, touched many minds and innumerable lives, from peasants to princesses, kings and queens, viceroys to vicious villains, in islands and on continents.
Here even as far back as 1939 when Patrick White published his first novel Happy Valley, he chose an epigraph from a Gandhi essay on suffering written in 1922, exactly a century ago today – suffering is the recurring leitmotif of White’s subsequent great fiction and other writings. The purer the suffering, the greater is the progress.
Like Gautama Budh Mohandas Gandhi understood the true meaning of human suffering, and his every act was towards removing that tear from every eye, in the lost, the lowest and the loneliest. In several essays and public conversations, our only literary Nobel laureate puts the Mahatma in the company of the Buddha and Jesus Christ and other prophets from the deserts. Gandhi was a rider in the chariot; in it all faiths are defined as one and the same.
Yet, I feel, Mohandas K Gandhi was different from all of them. He was so deeply human, so profoundly flawed, with no claim to divinity. But he believed fervently that every human being is potentially divine and there’s a spirit that is part of Life in any form and shape, face and place. It is the spirit of truth and love; God-given qualities.
It’s a spark that can be ignited with the fire of love; the flame and the rose are inseparable in our blundering humanity and inhumanity.
And the world is suffused with the splendour of that spirit which rolls through all things.
Several scholars in Australia have been interested in Gandhi’s extraordinary active life of almost 60 years on three continents.
Two books – one on Gandhi’s Ashrams and the other on the magnetic Salt March in 1930 have been written by Mark Thomas and by Mark Weber respectively.
However, the most comprehensive analysis of Gandhi’s ideas, concepts and practice of religion and its transformation through a single life, is by our own the late Professor JTF Jordens, who established the first Department of Indian Studies at Melbourne University in 1961. And joined the ANU in 1982 as a Dean, with Professor A.L. Basham. His richly researched volume, Gandhi’s Religion, first published in 1998, I chanced upon in Fyshwick market where there’s a bookstall run by LifeLine.
The latest publication in Canberra earlier this year is titled Gandhi’s Truths in an age of fundamentalism and nationalism.
The volume contains papers presented at the symposium held at the
Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, Barton Campus, CSU, marking the 150th birth anniversary of the Mahatma, three years ago. It was organised by the then Executive Director, Professor Stephen Pickard, and Professor Sathianathan Clarke from Wesley College, Washington.
I, too, played a small role in its organisation and discovered two friends.
Further, one day while visiting my late friend and former V-C of UC, Professor Don Aitkin, I saw the name of the CEO of Pine Residence – one Mr Niranjan Krishen Aggarwal.
I didn’t know him well, but knew that he was mainly responsible for the Gandhi statue in Glebe Park in Civic. Luckily, I’d a copy of my little volume Gandhianjali in my bag. I left that copy in his office.
A few days later I heard from him; much to my delight he is deeply dedicated to spreading the message of the Mahatma from here to Fiji. He has now founded The Mahatma Gandhi Society in Australia. Another footnote: in 1987 the Indian cricket board decided to build two statues in Kolkata’s Eden Gardens — one of Don Bradman, the other of Mahatma Gandhi. Sadly the Don fell ill and couldn’t travel. Imagine the Great Don and the Great Soul standing together, watching some very dubious deci
sions given by umpires. I think it was a fortunate piece of misfortune!
Finally, there was a conference held at HRC in 2004 in the shadow of the Iraq War – Gandhi and the Non-violent Relationality: Global Perspectives.
Selected Papers, edited by Debjani Ganguly and John Docker were published. Both editors have had lasting connections with the HRC. So now to my protean theme of the evening.
Gandhi’s religion
Gandhi’s Religion is oceanic: vast and varied, complex and contradictory, and forever in collision like waves in the sea. But like the Ganges it has a powerful flow through the pollution of politics and misrepresentations, critically curious scrutiny of his many experiments; but when you search for a river’s source you find it has infinite springs from which it takes its origins and flows towards the ocean. So are the beginnings and end of individuals. The Mahatma’s many texts and acts shaped his religious view of a changing life in daily living. We’re not rooted like trees; we flow like ever-changing waters, dreaming and streaming.
Gandhi was an original, but he copied ideas from many sources that were available to him from the East and the West, from theprophetic deserts and the gods and sages on the snow peaks of the Himalayas.
But, above all, in the soil, salt and soul of the subcontinent where he experimented with his sublime beliefs among his people with his deep sense of human decency and humility.
The man was and is the message. Gandhi’s religious faith was creative and embracing in a long life of action and contemplation, silence and conversation, reading and writing, in jail and in streets, while fighting for more than political freedom – it’s the great epic of love in an era of imprisoning racial violence, revolutionary ideas, communal hatred, and imperial mischief. During his lifetime Gandhi experienced the British Empire, South Africa, two world wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, the partition of India, and several violent revolutions. And many personal losses of family and friends, including his wife Kasturba.
Pietermaritzburg is small city about 80 kms from Durban. When I visited it in 1996 the railway station was desolate with a few dim lights glowing on that darkening railway platform.
The day coincided with the commemoration of Winston Churchill’s escape as a prisoner of the Boers.
Nelson Mandela was the president of South Africa and chaired the CHOGM meeting but I was keen to visit the obscure railway station where the young Gandhi, Attorney at Law, was ejected from his first-class compartment; the dandy lawyer’s suitcase thrown out in the chilly night of 7 June,1893.
In my mind it was a place of pilgrimage from where many protest marches began.
The lawyer, proud of his British law qualifications and his first-class ticket, shivered on the platform until a white man invited him to come and sit inside, a place, doubtless exclusively reserved for Whites only.
The train left the station in the intensifying darkness. But sometimes on the wrong train you reach the right destination or are destined to change the destiny of more than an empire.
Gandhi calls it the most creative night of his life. He decided to stay in South Africa and start his satyagraha against injustice and racial discrimination, disenfranchisement, practised against his migrated compatriots denied basic civil liberties.
As a newly trained lawyer, he believed in the rule of law based on justice to British subjects. He was an ardent admirer of the Empire until he saw its inherent evil corrupting both the ruler and the ruled.
In the process he invented the weapon of satyagraha: the soul force more powerful than any force and changed the Empire itself.
That fateful night was the most self-transforming moment but it took exactly a century before the structures of apartheid were partially deconstructed.
How did a shy, failed lawyer acquire such miraculous transformation in a century of genocide and unimaginable horrors?
Peace and ahimsa
Gandhi grew up and devised methods by which men and women he proclaimed should shape and live their lives of peace and ahimsa: love-in-action while opposing injustice of any kind or colour, in any country or community. But one had to be just in fighting injustice. Mohandas Gandhi’s childhood was rich in rituals and customary observances performed daily by his mother, the fourth wife of his Father.
Gandhi never forgot the spiritual acts of his mother and how she sacrificed herself to care for others.
She left an indelible mark on young Gandhi through her fasts and devotions that remained part of his life of service, selflessness and sacrifice until his dying day. The Gandhi household was full of visitors from almost every faith; they often prayed together in the same sacred space, although young Gandhi was not impressed by the conversion practised by the Christian missionaries. His closest teenage friend was a Muslim boy. Though born in a Hindu household, Gandhi’s faith resonates with several other faiths: Jainism, Buddhism, Zorastrianism, and elements of Islam. Later his closet friends in London and South Africa were Christians and Jews.
So his Hinduism was deeply ecumenical: the tree’s branches spread in many directions in the wind and rain of life where he heard the still sad music of humanity from every direction.
The world was often stormy with lightning and thunder. And Gandhi loved being in the midst of it all. But he believed that only the rains make things grow.
His longest journey was always inwards. And this led to the small voice within him; he called it the voice of his god and it became the anguished cry of the dumb millions.
He wrote:
We can only pray, if we are Hindu, not that a Christian should become a Hindu, or if we are Musalman, not that a Hindu or Christian should become a Mussalman, nor should we even secretly pray that one should be converted to our faith, but our innermost 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. And all religions are true: and all scriptures are divine
for one’s faith, he proclaimed.
Out of the creatively critical synthesis of so many spiritual strands he had made his own, he spun a large bulky homespun woollen shawl. At first it looks very plain to the eye, in Professor Jorderns delightful image, but we can detect the beauty of the strong patterns and contrasting shades of folk art.
With its knots and unevenness, it feels first rough to the touch; but soon, we can experience, how effective it is in warming cold and hungry limbs.
He wrapped his frail body in this homespun shawl and gave to an age the ageless message to the reality of the divine within and without every life. He lived it daily as daily as the daily bread.
The Gita became his rather tall walking stick which he interpreted with characteristic originality and often walked alone leaning on his lathi towards infinity.
How did he become the great soul—mahatma, a title he never felt at home in?
Religion
Gandhi was deeply influenced by a Jain poet, his ethical conduct from Buddhism, exaltation of service from his Christian friends, individual dignity and ideas of justice and equality of human rights through the Enlightenment. He was widely read.
But he also had a Hindu sensibility in the widest sense of the term. He believed that Hinduism was the world’s most hospitable religion. He rejected the idea that there was only one privileged path to God. He was well-versed in all religious texts and saw them as men-made – a mixture of truth and error.
If one text was holy, then others were equally sacred; all religions were rivers flowing in the same seas that girded Mother Earth of which Mother India was an integral part.
He believed that we should stick to the faith we were born into but ceaselessly improve its truth content in the light of new knowledge and interfaith dialogue and our actions in our daily lives. No religion had the exclusive right to Truth or God.
And if a sacred text written by men or revealed by an angel had things that didn’t stand to reason or one’s moral sense, it should be thrown like a rotten apple. Hence his rejection of untouchability which some felt was sanctioned by some holy texts to the advantage of unscrupulous men, and not a few women.
Years in jail gave him time not only to read but write prolifically on so many subjects that it boggles our mind.
He was a journalist par excellence. It is in the act of writing that he reached the most compassionate truths as Christ does when he says to the mob after writing on the ground.
He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.
The acts of writing became for Gandhi his deepening conscience — that still small voice that make heroes or cowards of us all.
Many educated people opposed his ideas of Religion: the secular socialists thought he was a medieval man; Muslims saw him primarily as a Hindu, and the orthodox Hindus saw him as denying the very essence of India as essentially a Hindu continent. And Christians felt he should convert to attain salvation through the light of Jesus Christ.
But he defied everybody.
Gandhi believed in the commonwealth of religions and his conception of religious pluralism was a gift to the idea of India as a modern nation. And how Hinduism may transcend and transmute its subcontinental boundaries into the human soul without boundaries.
The fact that Porbandar, Gandhi’s birthplace, was a port on the Arabian Sea, must have contributed to this openness. Seas are different from deserts; there are always possibilities of sailing beyond the shores: the waves tell us there’s another world, but it’s in this one: explore endlessly fellow travellers. Islands have different horizons. It’s significant that Australia is an island continent, washed by two oceans, many seas.
It’s equally notable that Gandhi created farms and ashrams but not temples. His whole vision of religious service was opposed to the orthodoxy prevailing in the casteobsessed, communally-charged, imperially-subjugated, atmosphere of his youth, controlled by the guns of the most militarily powerful and racist empire wherein many Indians were complicit with their petty privileges.
Aged 19, he had arrived in London, for what he imagined the very centre of civilisation, though he was outcasted from his community for crossing the kala pani, black waters. There was no city like London in the mind of Indians and the colonised elite, including Australia.
But from the beginning he was a rebel with many causes, and no pauses. He took a vow in front of his mother that he won’t touch meat, wine and women. Despite occasional temptations and persuasions by more experienced Indian Londoners, he kept his vows.
His many vows later sprang from this promise to his mother and what he had seen in his mother’s living.
His meeting with the Vegetarian Society influenced him, as did the teachings of the Theosophist group.
In those formative years he imbibed the values and ideals of simplicity, purity, poverty, truthfulness and love of people. Indeed, for all life.
And met some remarkable individuals. His interest developed from diets to deities, from sanitation to salvation. For the first time he began reading Hindu scriptures in English translations.
Gandhi wanted to be a poet too: Luckily he escaped that fate and became a saint. But he was profoundly influenced by a Jain poet Raychand Bhai.
And also by the writings of Leo Tolstoy, especially the Kingdom of God is Within You. And the works of others like Ruskin and Thoreau, among others.
While he didn’t convert to Christianity, he moved closely with Christians. And no-one he loved more than Rev CF Andrews. The Sermon on the Mount, he said, went straight to my heart.
What Jesus Christ preached, Mahatma Gandhi lived in his much longer life.
Later in his own book Hind Swaraj, 1909, written in nine days, he expressed his germinating phi
losophy of service and the spiritual power of the soul. And delineated the disastrous course of modern, mechanical, western civilisation inimical to the soul of man, alien to the life that Christ talked about. A century later one can see how prescient were some of his perceptions. The book was written as an argument against the budding terrorists in London. Not long after the Great War I began.
One has simply to look around to see what we’ve done to our wounded world in less than a century since Gandhi preached and practised his philosophy of ahimsa and satyagraha to right the wrongs of our fellow men and women.
There was enough for the need of everyone on this Earth, but not enough for the greed of even one, he wrote. The Earth that produced daffodils also had uranium in it. Hence his famous comment when asked what he thought of western civilisation, he replied it would be a good idea.
But he believed people can change and one can even melt the heart of a Hitler, with courage and suffering. There’s no place for cowardice in life: if it comes to violence: ‘shed the blood but it should be your own, nobody else’s.’
When G B Shaw remarked that vegetarianism has no appeal to the tiger, Gandhi replied he did not believe that the British are all tiger and no man.
Gandhi’s agitation against the Indenture system brought him in close contact with his unique friendship with Charlie Andrews. It was Rev Andrews whose efforts finally led to the abolition of the abomination of Indenture in 1920, almost exactly a century ago and he visited Australia three times.
It was in the Australian adventure of indenture in Fiji that my grandparents were transported and my parents were born around the time Gandhi was sharpening his weapon of satyagraha in Natal and Transvaal. All currents flow in the tumultuous ocean of history even as we are caught in the crosscurrents. Gandhi’s beliefs led to a unique understanding of religion and politics. They were the Siamese twins of public life.
And all life was indivisible. By separating our morality from political responsibility, he felt men were absolving themselves from the actions of their fellow human beings. It was an easy way out.
By merging politics and his ideas of religion, Gandhi had brought forth a new weapon of liberation of India from the imperial rule. He continued to redefine the very concept of power developed through violence of thought, word and deed.
But it had consequences: the more he insisted on the symbolism of Ramarajya the more alienated sections of the community felt with the treacherous connivance of the Raj.
All he had in mind was the dharma enshrined in the epics by which the universe exists both in the atman and Brahaman.
Britannia then did rule the waves, and often waived the rules to her convenience in the largest colony. But Gandhi was interested in the quality of action for the liberation of India and ultimately the liberation of the people and a country’s soul.
Even Joe Biden’s slogan today is Saving the Soul of America, though he gets trumped.
His most disastrous opposition came from the orthodoxy of Hinduism fossilised over millennia with texts and ruled by castes and priests and scriptures.
He knew you do not create untouchability of millions overnight. The satanic verses in any religion must be deleted.
Fasting, celibacy, vows, oaths, and actions all concentrated towards one aim: moksha, liberation, for millions. God, Soul, Truth may not be visible but they exist, in one form or another.
With bits and pieces from many scriptures, he built his nest on the speaking human tree with many branches but one trunk and many invisible and visible roots.
He didn’t claim any divinity for himself but believed that the divine was within every living thing. Hence Ahimsa—love-in -action. It was personal transformations and salvation that he believed in. And he felt that every individual had the power within to reach the highest ideals of his or her belief. His fasts, silences, writings, vows and political actions were all designed to take him deeper into the world of human affairs, from fighting without bitterness the mighty Empire to the curse of untouchability in his backyard.
The miracle is that he succeeded in doing so much, so peacefully. And he also saved millions of people through his fasts, and tours of the mutilated streets of Delhi and in the corpse-strewn jungles of Bengal.
He saved more lives than the armies of the Raj.
But his religion was not of this world. He left behind no isms. It was all about his heart, humanity, hope and an unfailing sense of humour.
No saintly soul had his sense of humour. That is the uniqueness of the man who became the Mahatma. Gandhi showed and lived that the most enduring fact of life is not material achievements, the broken empires, but the evolution of the human soul in search of the meaning
of living and union with spirit of the universe.
Lessons from the world
the
To be true, to be simple, to be pure and gentle of heart, to remain calm and cheerful in suffering, not to fear dying, to serve the spirit and not be haunted by the spirit of the dead, to live and let live, and to love: through ahimsa see the face of God, face-to-face?
He tried to give it a sense of concrete reality through action. Perhaps Gandhi’s idea of a spiritual view of life was akin to the Aboriginal vision of the world with its song lines and countries of the soul and a spirit that dwells within us and in our environment. That there has not been a significant Gandhian movement on our continent, remains a mystery to me. Mahatma Gandhi would have learnt a lot from the oldest continuous culture on our damaged planet. He taught us how to protest in peace and be prepared to suffer in the process—the power of suffering is immense and immeasurable in a timeless land.
Now that we know the lure of organised religion is lessening, we may discover the spirit that makes the light shine, the wind to blow, the rivers to flow and flood, fires to burn, and our heartbeats to continue beating and breathing.
And those ripples in our manmade lake on a windy spring morning in our most liveable, lovable city.
That religious view, if you will, is the only way to love and heal the wounded planet which is our common home, whether you live on an island or a continent.
Gandhi perhaps understood it intuitively but experimented it rationally.
Even his failures are better than the successes of so many men and women with guns and vast armies with pomp and ceremonies.
The ultimate purpose of religion is to free the spirit imprisoned in the body of passions and desires to become part of the Absolute that is all around us: become a drop that falls into the ocean.
And to realise we are waves in the sea but so is the sea. And when drops meet, they acquire the majesty of an ocean.
This led to service to the least of humanity, not the isolation of a sanyasi in a cave or on top of the mountain.
To him the country of the soul contained all. And by his actions he showed how powerful is this idea of the soul. What is more remarkable is that he touched the souls of men and women unlike any other human being and left a light still burning in all kinds of darkness. Atman and the split atom have astonishing power—no-one understood it deeper than his great contemporary Albert Einstein.
Yet he left no Gandhism. Nor any holy scripture except his very ordinary words and extraordinary deeds.
There are no apocalyptic revelations in Gandhi’s experiments with Truth. Just human acts of courage and faith and love without fear or hatred.
It’s a magnificent message to a world which thinks it’s modern but our so many acts are so monstrous to a breathing Mother Earth. There’s no doubt that religion was the quintessential element in the making of the mahatma. But his ideas of religion were very different from the commonly understood term.
His religion was the religion of Truth; he began saying is Truth is God— Denial of God we’ve known. Denial of Truth, he said, we’ve not. Gandhi believed that we all have sparks of truth in us. The sum total of it for him was God.
He didn’t claim any superhuman powers: I wear the same corruptible flesh that the weakest of my fellow beings wears and am as liable to err as any, he confessed.
His religion was service. For him sanctity and service were inseparable. I could not be leading a religious life unless I identified myself with the whole of life.
Hence my involvement in politics. The whole gamut of human activities today constitutes an indivisible whole.
Life cannot be divided in compartments: we can see how life is affected daily by our actions on the planet.
He wrote:
I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet with all humility, that those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.
But it was not a religion of rites, rituals, dogmas or doctrines. We may conform to such forms because it brings social advantages and political privileges. We invoke the name of God and despise our neighbours. We deceive ourselves. For Gandhi religion was a passional-personal participation in the life of the spirit. It was practical and dynamic. He was keenly aware of the pain in the world, of what man had done and was doing to his fellow men.
Politics divorced from religion for him was a corpse fit only to be burned.
Politics was part of the ethics of religion. It was to help the submerged millions to breathe freely and live in freedom and God-given dignity in friendship and fellowship. As he wrote in his autobiography in the chapter on an Indentured Labourer named Balasundram. It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings. It is said that the prophets of spirit make history by standing outside history.
One leading intellectual of the day once challenged him. Mr Gandhi you may know all about the Bible and the Bhagwad Gita, but you know nothing at all about history. Never has a nation been able to free itself without violence.
Gandhi smiled at the Professor of History and English. You know nothing about history, he corrected gently. The first thing you have to learn about history is that because something has not taken place in the past, that does not mean it cannot take place in the future.
India has produced poets of epical grandeur of mind and imagination about war and peace, about the battle between Good and Evil. But none, I feel, had a more comprehensive and inclusive soulful vision of our world than Mohandas Gandhi.
Great epic of the human soul
Mahatma Gandhi’s great epic is about the human soul and his ceaseless search for LOVE in the soul: but the soul is always another country that the mahatma kept searching for until his last breath. And in his death, he left the possibility of the intimations of immortality for all of us.
Professor Jordens felt the rough shawl could accommodate a variety of religious experience. And on the day of his death Mahatma Gandhi was wearing a soft woollen shawl woven in Australia. The three bullets burnt holes in that shawl.
But, I feel, his soul remained intact, and for that we must feel great gratitude: as a man of his time who asked the deepest questions, he became a man of all times and all places, including ours.
Years ago, at Sabarmati Ashram, I found a copy of John Briley’s GANDHI, The Screen Play.
Briley writes: After searching desperately for Gandhi in many books, I read what GANDHI HAD WRITTEN IN MOMENTS OF SILENCE AND SOLITUDE AND HIS SOUL’S SUFFERINGS ON HIS LIFEJOURNEYS:
THIS OPEN, QUESTING, UNPRETENTIOUS MAN BEGAN TO UNFOLD FOR ME.THE WELLSPRINGS 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 AND THE CYNICAL PATEL …AND THE VIILLAGE PEASANT WHO HAD NEVER BEEN FIVE MILES FROM THE MUD-BRICK HOUSE WHERE HE WAS BORN.
AND GRADUALLY I SAW TOO THAT GANDHI WAS NOT IMPRACTICAL, NOT IDEALISTIC. HIS IDEAS WERE FORGED IN PAINFUL EXPERIENCE, A GROWTH OF PERCEPTION EARNED FROM LIFE…
THIS BRAVE, DETERMINED MAN I DISCOVERED AND TO SHOW HIS UNSENTIMENAL HONESTY ABOUT THE COMPLEXITY OF MEN AND HIS UNSHAKEABLE BELIEF THAT ON BALANCE THEY ARE MARGINALLY MORE INCLINED TO GOOD THAN EVIL…AND ON THAT SLIGHT IMBALANCE THEY CAN BUILD AND ACHIEVE AND PERHAPS SURVIVE—EVEN IN A NUCLEAR AGE.
GANDHI LIVED…THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL DRAMA OF ALL: THE WAR IN OUR HEARTS BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE.HE KNEW IT WAS A WAR, A WAR WITH MANY DEFEATS, BUT HE BELIEVED IN ONLY ONE VICTOR.
OR
As the unknown Greek poet wrote with Socratic wisdom a long time before Mohandas was born in an obscure seaside PORT, far from any manger but surrounded by cows and children:
What else is wisdom?
What of man’s endeavour or
God’s high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, To breathe and wait,
To hold a hand uplifted over hate And shall not loveliness be loved forever?