Mohandas Gandhi

From Philosopedia.org

Gandhi, (Mahatma) Mohandas Karamchand (2 October 1869 - 30 January 1948)

The Mahatma (great-souled) preached Muslim and Christian ethics along with the Hindu, and he was a proponent of satyagraha (passive resistance). Gandhi has appealed to many religious humanists - he was technically a secularist, not a humanist - and, for example, members of New York’s Community Church (Unitarian) at 40 East 35th Street erected a statue of him which can be seen at the southwest corner of Union Square in Manhattan.

An undistinguished student, he was married at the age of 13 and, at age 19, he was sent by his family to London to study law at the Inner Temple. Returning to India and unable to find a suitable post as barrister, he accepted a year's contract in Natal, South Africa, where although suffering the humiliation of racial prejudice there for the first time in his life he was successful and led the Indian community. Renouncing material wealth, he dressed in a loincloth and shawl, symbolic of his Hindu abstemiousness and abandonment (1905) of Western clothing. His threatened “fasts unto death” successfully achieved political concessions, and his highly publicized doctrine of non-violence and truth-force were echoes of Thoreau’s essay, ”Civil Disobedience” (1849) [[1]]. They would later influence pacifists as well as civil rights officials and Martin Luther King Jr.

During World War II, Gandhi was loyal to the British Government, but when India did not receive self-government after the Amritsar Rebellion and the Rowlatt Enactments, Gandhi declared 6 April 1919 a day of National Humiliation. He exhorted Indians to be passively resistant.

In 1921 he had become the recognized leader of the Indian National Congress, which had as its goal complete national independence. A devout Hindu, he accepted Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and parts of the Bhaghavad Gita as guides for his non-violence.

“The most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record,” he wrote in Young India (1927), “have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.”

His use of a hunger strike and a fast unto death as spiritual instruments forced the British to institute a program of gradual power sharing, but only after Gandhi was interned in 1942.

In 1946, he publicly confessed that he had been taking naked girls to bed with him for many years - to test his mastery of celibacy. (His father had died while in the act of intercourse.)

In 1947, British India was divided into two states; Gandhi argued against forming the independent state of Pakistan. However, in the year of Gandhi’s death a conflict between India and Pakistan commenced, and more than one million died in the battles between Hindus and Moslems (1947—1948, 1965, 1971).

Critics such as the playwright Ajit Dalvi have written of Gandhi’s troubled relationship with his eldest son, Haribal, who, according to The Economist (29 August 1998), “boozed, whored and converted to Islam.” Their grandson’s biography of Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, told that Gandhi’s sudden vow of chastity at the age of thirty-seven exemplified sacrifices he had heaped upon her throughout her life. Yogesh Chadha’s 1997 biography cited Gandhi confessing,

• I have a strain of cruelty in me . . . such that people force themselves to do things, even to attempt impossible things, in order to please me.

He once threatened to evict his wife for having failed to clean an untouchable’s chamber pot, and he disowned Harilal for marrying without his permission. The various critics have focused not only on his heroism in breaking the British Empire with hunger strikes and a spinning wheel but also upon his cruelty.

Unlike those believers who seek immortality in mausoleums, Hindus seek oblivion in cremation. A simple marker at Rajghat in New Delhi indicates where Gandhi was cremated after his assassination by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic who had been angered by Gandhi’s solicitude for the Moslems. Some of his ashes were given to friends, some were taken to Allahabad, some were placed in the State Bank of India in Cuttack, and forty-nine years after he was killed his ashes in 1997 were handed over to his great grandson, Tushar Arun Gandhi, who immersed them into the mother river (the Ganga Ma). Meanwhile, still other of Gandhi’s ashes are found at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, California.

{CB; CE; ER; FUK; PA; TYD}