A chance to live like Gandhi
Ashram in India lets tourists walk in famed leader’s footsteps
Mahatma Gandhi’s home here has been opened as a guest house. You can now stay in his famous Kochrab Ashram, sleep where he slept, walk where he walked, pray where he prayed and eat what he ate — for only $20 (U.S.) night.
Meals are included. You shop. You cook. You wash up. You share the load.
All this, provided you renounce violence and materialism, keep chaste, follow in his sandal steps as an ethical and responsible traveller. Gandhi had a very low ecological footprint.
Ahmedabad, an hour-long flight from Mumbai, was once the centre of India’s textile industry.
It’s most famous for being the city from which Mahatma Gandhi launched his civil disobedience, or “Satyagraha,” movement.
In 1930, his 390-kilometre Salt March, undertaken with 48 followers, began from his ashram on the banks of the Sabarmati River and ended in Dandi.
The ashram and his Hridaya (Heart) Kunj cottage residence, a simple bungalow on the riverfront, was the nerve centre for the Indian freedom movement and is now a memorial centre museum and library.
Gandhi’s first and lesser-known Indian ashram, which he founded in 1915 after his return from South Africa — where he worked as a legal adviser and set up the Phoenix settlement near Durban — is now open to house guests.
It offers a unique working holiday and the possibility of self-purification.
Tourists can sample the lifestyle of India’s famously ascetic independence leader and devoted Hinduist at the 22guest Kochrab Ashram in Paldi.
Guests stay in Gandhi’s former spinning workshops and can try their hand on period charkha.
Weaving lessons are available. You are required to wear khadi: handwoven cloth. The early morning devotional songs are optional.
You can also do charity work both within the city slums and in the outlying villages. But it must adhere to Gandhi’s 11 vows, and days start at 6 a.m.
“The objective of our program is to allow people to experience a sustainable lifestyle, to enjoy the simplicity of Gandhi and experience the virtue of his Great Soul,” says Nischalavalamb Barot, a travel agent and former restaurant manager who is behind the unique “Live Gandhi for a While” initiative.
“We won’t turn people into great souls. But the experience might transform perceptions toward life, society and natural resources. It might also help tourists find peace and satisfaction within. It’s an inspiring place.
“We don’t expect guests to renounce materialism totally, but perhaps they may become better sadhaka, or servants of society.” The ashram is managed by Ahmedabad’s Gujarat Vidyapith University, which Gandhi founded in 1920 to “liberate the Indian youths from the shackles of British colonial rule.” (For details on staying overnight, visit maroonmigrates.com).
India has plenty of museums and monuments to honour the country’s independence icon.
These include his birthplace in Porbandar, Mani Bhawan (his residence at19 Laburnum Rd., Gamdevi, Mumbai), New Delhi’s Eternal Gandhi Museum at Birla House where he was shot and “attained martyrdom,” and the city’s National Gandhi Museum.
On display, there is a walking stick, some of his teeth, and a blood-soaked loincloth and shawl. And a bullet.
The marble platform at his samadhi cremation site on the Yamuna River bears the epigraph “O Ram” (O God), reputedly his last words. His ashes were scattered in the Nile, Thames and Volga rivers. Some are enshrined in the Aga Khan Palace Pune and some in Lake Shrine, Pacific Palisades, Calif.
In the Akhiri Nivas (“last abode”) ashram in Sevagram (“village of service”), 120 kilometres from Nagpur in Maharashtra, you can see Gandhi’s Adi Nivas (last hut), his sleeping cot, a humane snake trap, massage table, telephone and the palm mat on which he sat from 1936, dictating his thoughts on life, self-determination and “nation-building activities.”
There are also small museums at Rajkot, Gujarat, where he grew up, and Bhavnagar where he went to college.
As well as the new “living museum” in Ahmedabad.
“Offering the chance to live like Gandhi, we’re attempting to understand the value and principles of a sustainable life, which Gandhi believed in and practised,” adds Barot.
“He was the first responsible traveller. He travelled cross-country, visiting villages, staying in local communities and tried to find solutions to their problems — with minimum impact on their environment. That’s what responsible tourism is all about.”
Creating better places for people to live and for people to visit. Kevin Pilley is the U.K.’s most published travel writer. His trip was sponsored by Maroon Migrates, the Indian Tourist Board and Jet Airways.