Reading: Responsive Reading #577: "It is Possible to Live in Peace" by Mohandas K. Gandhi, in Singing the Living Tradition.

Like any great, influential figure, history has left us with several Mohandas K. Gandhi's to contemplate. There is, for example, the Mythic Gandhi, just as there is the mythic George Washington or the mythic Abraham Lincoln. This is the Gandhi about whom Albert Einstein wrote, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."[1] Like the mythic Washington and the mythic Lincoln, the Mythic Gandhi is larger than life. Even during Gandhi's lifetime, the Mythic Gandhi was already born. Many of his followers and even some of his enemies recognized in Gandhi saintly characteristics. The title "Mahatma," meaning "Great Soul," was bestowed by followers and adopted by most of the world while he was still alive. Both during and after his life, many of Gandhi's Hindu followers went a step beyond sainthood and saw him as an extraordinary embodiment of God. Icons of Gandhi have made their way into Hindu home altars across the world.

I vividly remember getting a glimpse of this Mythical Gandhi when Gandhi's grandson Arun visited Appleton several years ago. At the conclusion of the interfaith service celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday, I followed Arun Gandhi off the stage and up one of the aisles of the Lawrence Chapel. Many Indians in the audience clamored to get close to Arun, to give him the honored greeting of folded hands and even to touch him. Following Arun in silence, I felt as if I had suddenly been transported to one of the Hindu temple celebrations I had witnessed in Sri Lanka. The response surely was an expression of thanks for Arun's eloquent words and for all his grandfather did. But it was more than that, too. As a blood descendent of Gandhi, Arun carried within himself some of the divinity embodied in his grandfather. An important aspect of Hindu worship is called darsan. Darsan is the act of seeing a holy image, place or person. But darsan is not just about seeing the embodiment of divinity; it's also about being seen by the god. Through darsan, the worshiper is blessed. That evening in the Lawrence University Chapel, the eternal, powerful Mythic Gandhi was alive in his grandson, blessing the Hindus by the simple act of Arun's seeing them.

The Mythic Gandhi is also a symbolic figure, an embodiment of the ideals he gave expression to in both words and deeds. This aspect of the Mythic Gandhi was as compelling to his enemies as his followers. Those Hindu extremists who conspired to kill Gandhi certainly saw Gandhi as a symbol of Muslim/Hindu unity. For them, the living symbol of Muslim/Hindu unity had to be killed in order to kill once and for all the possibility of such unity. So they killed Mohandas K. Gandhi in order to kill the Mythic Gandhi. Their logic--as is always the case with assassins fueled by fanaticism--was fatally flawed. You can't kill a mythic figure. There was a wonderful cartoon printed in the Chicago Sun-Times after King's assassination in 1968. In the cartoon, King stands by a seated, smiling Gandhi. Gandhi says, "The odd thing about assassins, Dr. King, is that they think they've killed you."[2] Perhaps Gandhi's most effective work for Hindu/Muslim unity happened immediately after his assassination by Hindu extremists. His assassination brought Muslims and Hindus together in a way Gandhi never could while alive. [3] This was the Mythic Gandhi at work.

A second Gandhi is the British Gandhi. This is the Gandhi celebrated in Sir Richard Attenborough's 1982 film that captured so much Oscar hardware. The British Gandhi incorporates many of the aspects of the Mythic Gandhi, only the hero now is a little more human and a little less divine. You may recall, for example, a scene in the film displaying Gandhi's human weakness. Complaining that it's the work of Untouchables, Gandhi's wife Kasturbai refuses to clean the latrines in their intentional community (or ashram). Gandhi, who already has been shown responding courageously yet non-violently to blows from South African police, loses his temper and tries to literally push his wife out of the ashram. Everyone in the ashram must take a turn cleaning the latrine, Gandhi tells her. Everyone. For Gandhi this is an important symbol of the wide-open, liberating inclusiveness of his community. Gandhi quickly realizes his sin in losing his self-restraint. He berates himself and apologizes to his wife. She shakes her head and says, "You're only human!"--and agrees to clean the latrine. The marriage is saved; the idealism of the ashram is preserved; and Gandhi gets his way.

Just as he always seemed to get his way in his wrangles with the British. In a sense, Gandhi's wife in this scene represents the British. This mostly saintly yet flawed man wins another one! He always wins, one way or another. Sooner or later. The movie contains a steady parade of Gandhi pushing the limits, agitating, being arrested, then meeting with one or another British official who one way or another gives in to Gandhi's demands.

In the process of this elaborate, long dance with the British, Gandhi changed the British--just as he changes his wife's attitude toward Untouchables. "Gandhi's triumph," posters hawking the movie Gandhi scream, "changed the world forever."[4] It certainly changed the British. In many ways, the movie Gandhi and other British novels and movies about India are interpretations of how India and Gandhi in particular changed Britain.

And this leads to another crucial characteristic of the British Gandhi: the British Gandhi ultimately is more about Britain and his effect on the British than about India. The British Gandhi is forever locked into a great dance with the British, teaching the British through his words and deeds a better way to be in the world.

The heart of the British Gandhi's struggle with his British imperial overlords is his desire for his fellow Indians to gain as much self-pride, respect, freedom and independence as the British enjoy. The British Gandhi is cast in the role of a noble George Washington or Frederick Douglas, toiling for the equality of his people. The British carefully edit out a major and radical emphasis of Gandhi's efforts--his utter and complete rejection of everything Western.

A third Gandhi is the post-modern, Deconstructed Gandhi. The Deconstructed Gandhi is the opposite of the saintly, Mythic Gandhi. Those partial to this Gandhi take the movie scene with Gandhi shoving his wife and relentlessly run with it. This Gandhi centers on his subjugation of his wife and his struggles with sex--including his vow of celibacy in 1906 and how he tested his chastity near the end of his life by lying in bed with young women. The Deconstructed Gandhi, full of human flaws and far, far from sainthood, is related to the adulterous Martin Luther King, Jr. on the eve of his assassination and Thomas Jefferson and his sexual relationship with his slave.

A fourth Gandhi stands out to me as the most compelling. This is what I call the Radical Gandhi. The Radical Gandhi begins with his core ideas about non-violence and civil disobedience. Though now so well known they hardly seem radical, and though they've been carried out with some success particularly in our own country's civil rights movement and in South Africa, the ideas themselves are still radical. Gandhi's vision of non-violence rests on the foundation of Thoreau, Jesus, the Buddha and, maybe most importantly, the Jain religion that emerged in India around the same time as Buddhism. Central to the Jain world-view is the concept of ahimsa, avoiding harm of any creature. Gandhi was clearly influenced by the many Jain acquaintances he knew in his youth.

Gandhi was the first person in history to extend non-violence from a primarily religious or philosophical realm into the political realm. He sought through non-violent resistance to inflict pain and suffering not on the enemy but on himself and his followers. He believed that such suffering would eventually open the oppressors' eyes to the suffering their oppression causes. His goal was to convert, not coerce his enemies. Long-term justice can only be built on conversion, never on coercion.

Gandhi always admitted the possibility that he might be wrong. He was therefore not prepared to kill for any cause. But he was prepared to die for a just cause. Gandhi ditched the phrase "passive resistance" to describe his efforts because he thought the phrase was too weak. There is nothing passive about Gandhi's non-violent resistance. He argued that non-violent resistance requires far more courage than fighting with weapons. Marching without weapons toward a soldier or police officer who has a stick or a gun poised to attack you certainly does require a level of courage the person with the weapon doesn't need. You have to be prepared to suffer serious injury and even death over and over again.

For Gandhi, non-violence must always begin with oneself. Winning home rule had to begin with ruling one's own home: one's body. Gandhi constantly talked about self-restraint, and tried to practice extreme self-restraint in his own life. This was the motivation for his vows of chastity and poverty.

Universalism was another radical idea Gandhi embraced. "Religions," he wrote, "are different readings converging on the same point." "I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew," he declared.[5]

His universalism compelled him to work for Muslim/Hindu unity, which he called his "life's mission."[6] "I believe with my whole soul," he wrote, "that the God of the Koran is also the God of the Gita, and that we are all, no matter by what name designated, children of the same God."[7] Gandhi anchored his universalism firmly in the universalistic tendencies of Hinduism that I have talked about the past two weeks. As one Muslim critic observed, "only a Hindu" could say that he was a Hindu and a Muslim.[8]

Gandhi's most radical and, in the West anyway, least appreciated idea was his complete and utter rejection of modern Western civilization. He did not seek to make India equal to the West or to help Indians enjoy the luxuries of the West. Rather, he believed that India was vastly superior to the corrupt West. He sought to rid India of all Western influence. This, far more than simply evicting the British, was his pre-eminent goal. "Indian civilization is the best and the European is the nine day's wonder," he wrote.[9] He believed that in India the world would find the answer to the decadence of Western civilization.

Gandhi's critique of the West is as provocative and insightful today as it was ninety years ago. In 1909, he wrote:

I...have grown disillusioned with Western civilization. The people whom you meet on the way seem half-crazy. They spend their days in luxury or in making a bare living and retire at night thoroughly exhausted...While Western civilization is still young, we find that things have come to such a pass that, unless its whole machinery is thrown overboard, people will destroy themselves like so many moths.[10]

For Gandhi, India's answer to the West lay in her history and in her undeveloped villages. He put the traditional village art of hand-spinning cloth--a pre-Industrial Revolution technology that flourished in India a hundred and fifty years earlier--at the center of his revolution. In many ways Gandhi was a radical reactionary, an eloquent renouncer of industrialization and modern progress.

Gandhi admitted that Hinduism's caste system and treatment of women worked against India's claim to superiority. For these problems, he again turned to the past for solutions. From an early age he was repulsed by the terrible mistreatment of Untouchables. He claimed that such mistreatment was a perversion of the spirit and ancient tradition of Hinduism. Ancient Hinduism taught that all souls are ultimately the same. All souls are equally part of the Oneness that is God. Gandhi's passionate articulation of this principle has helped India make significant progress in undoing the injustice of caste, though there is still a long way to go.

But Gandhi wanted to keep the element of the caste system that locked people into the occupations of their ancestors. He believed that people inherit qualities that make them skilled at particular jobs. He valued the full range of occupations and embraced the ancient understanding that all jobs contribute to the good of the community. He believed that every job should therefore pay the same, living wage. In Gandhi's ideal village, the judge and the business person and the toilet cleaner would all make the same wage.

Similarly, Gandhi believed that although women and men ultimately have the same soul, they have inherently different duties in life. Women's traditional duty is more focused on keeping the home in order. His answer to the oppression of women was again to turn back the clock to his ideal of the ancient India, where he argued Hindus valued women's work every bit as much as men's work.

A final Gandhi is the Failure Gandhi. Many in both India and the West continue to diminish Gandhi's legacy by focusing on his failures. There are many failures to choose from, beginning with the hanging of his assassin and an accomplice in the murder. Surely Gandhi would have found this punishment for his killers to be completely contrary to non-violence. His killers' execution is a powerful symbol that independent India is essentially a post-Gandhian India. The reborn India is not at all the India Gandhi envisioned. Gandhi told an Indian parable about a proverb that says "the cradle bespeaks the child's future."[11] The India he saw in its new-born nationhood--an India riven with communal violence and already on the path of expanding its military--did not bode well for its future. Gandhi was so disgusted and disappointed that he didn't stay in the capital for the independence celebration but went to be among poor, threatened Muslims in Calcutta. And he said that he would soon quit the country altogether and move to Pakistan.

If Gandhi came back today, he would find an India still ripped apart by communal violence, an India perpetually in a cold or hot war with Pakistan, an India with nuclear weapons named for Hindu gods, and an India in many ways far more Westernized and Americanized than British India ever was. He would find the world of the traditional India village and the spinning wheel even more threatened today than in his day. And he would find a world in which at least twenty million more people have been killed in wars. As one Indian critic writes, the movie Gandhi's claim that "Gandhi's triumph changed the world forever" is completely wrong. Gandhi didn't even change India.

Those who lift up the Failure Gandhi are always quick to point out that Gandhi's non-violence would never have worked against the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin. Gandhi's non-violence only worked because the British actually worried about losing their moral authority and actually cared what the rest of the world thought of them.

The Failure Gandhi has some validity, but I don't think failure will ultimately be Gandhi's legacy. Gandhi knew that justice takes a long time but will one day prevail: "Remember the old proverb that the tree does not grow in one day," he wrote.[12] As a Hindu he believed in reincarnation. Instead of the time-frame of seventy or eighty years that we envision for ourselves, he saw his soul living for thousands, even millions of years. He believed that it might well take him several more lives to truly cultivate non-violence. Justice-making takes a long time. Gandhi also knew that justice takes a mix of dedication and detachment. One's effort and mindset are what count, not necessarily victory, at least in this lifetime. Gandhi knew, too, that justice takes stubbornness and courage. He was as stubborn as they come, digging in harder with each set-back and each failure. He was courageous enough to risk death time and time again for his beliefs. He was never a field general, sending out the troops to do the risky work while he looked on from afar with field glasses. And anticipating Rosa Parks, Gandhi knew that justice always starts with one person.

Understanding, speaking, and living these truths about justice changed the world--maybe more than anything else Gandhi did. Just ask Nelson Mandela. Just ask Rosa Parks. Just ask Coretta Scott King. And someday, after Tibet is free at last and China is free at last, ask the Dalai Lama or the man who stood in front of the tank in Beijing. These truths about justice are Gandhi's lasting legacy. These truths are his great triumph. And they always will be.

Closing Words: by Judy Chicago
And then all that has divided us will merge
And then compassion will be wedded to power
And then softness will come to a world that is harsh and unkind
And then both men and women will be gentle
And then both women and men will be strong
And then no person will be subject to another's will
And then all will be rich and free and varied
And then the greed of some will give way to the needs of many
And then all will share equally in the Earth's abundance
And then all will care for the sick and the weak and the old
And then all will nourish the young
And then all will cherish life's creatures
And then all will live in harmony with each other and with the Earth
And then everywhere will be called Eden once again.[13]

Copyright 2000 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.

[1]Yogesh Chadha, Gandhi: A Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997), p. 1.
[2]Ibid., picture opposite p. 279.
[3]Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 355-356.
[4]Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (New York: Arcade, 1997), p. 17.
[5]Ibid., p. 21.
[6]Rudrangshu Mukherjee, ed., The Penguin Gandhi Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 273.
[7]Ibid., p. 274.
[8]Tharoor, p. 21.
[9]Mukherjee, p. 63.
[10]Chadha, p. 159.
[11]Mukherjee, p. 87.
[12]Ibid., p. 6.
[13]Reading #464 by Judy Chicago in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.)