What remains of Gandhi today? What should remain of Gandhi today? Some of his teachings are plainly irrelevant. For example, his ideas on food (his diet consisted chiefly of nuts and fruits and boiled vegetables), medicine (he wished to treat cancer with water baths), and sex (he imposed a strict celibacy on his followers) can hardly find favour with the majority of humans. That said, there are at least four areas in which Gandhi’s ideas remain of interest and importance.
The first area is non-violent resistance. That social change is both less harmful and more sustainable when achieved by non-violent means is now widely recognised. A study of some 60 transitions to democratic rule since World War II, by the think tank Freedom House, found that ‘far more often than is generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, non-violent civic resistance — which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience to de-legitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support.
The second area is faith. Gandhi was at odds both with secularists who confidently looked forward to God’s funeral, and with monotheists who insisted that theirs was the one and true God. Gandhi believed that no religion had a monopoly on the truth. He argued that one should accept the faith into which one was born (hence, his opposition to conversion), but seek always to practice it in the most broad-minded and non-violent way. And, he actively encouraged friendships across religions. His own best friend was a Christian priest, C F Andrews.
The third area is the environment. The rise of China and India has brought a long suppressed, and quintessentially Gandhian, question to the fore: How much should a person consume? So long as the West had a monopoly on modern lifestyles, the question simply did not arise. But if most Chinese and Indians come, like most Americans and Englishmen, to own and drive a car, this will place unbearable burdens on the earth. Back in 1928, Gandhi had warned about the unsustainability, on the global scale, of Western patterns of production and consumption. “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialisation after the manner of the West,” he said. ‘The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts’. An aphorism often attributed to him runs as follows: ‘The world has enough for everybody’s need, but not enough for everybody’s greed’. Gandhi’s respect for other religions, other races, other castes, was intimately connected with his philosophy of non-violence. He opposed injustice and authoritarian rule, but without arms. He reached out to people of other faiths, with understanding and respect. Where the proselytizer took his book to the heathen — backed sometimes with the bayonet and bullet — Gandhi chose rather to studying Islamic and Christian texts, bringing to them the same open, yet not uncritical, mind that he brought to Hindu scriptures.
The fourth area where Gandhi matters is public life. In his ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, George Orwell wrote that ‘regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’ In an age of terror, politicians may not be able to live as open a life as Gandhi. There were no security men posted outside his ashram; visitors of any creed and nationality would walk in when they chose. His social experiments were minutely dissected in the pages of his newspapers.
Gandhi was a prophet, of sorts, but by no means a joyless one. On a visit to London in 1931, he met a British monarch for the first and last time. When he came out of Buckingham Palace after speaking with George VI, a reporter asked whether he had not felt cold in his loin-cloth. Gandhi answered, “The King had enough on for both of us.” In the self-deprecatory joke lies a good deal of (still enduring) wisdom.
Sixty three years after his death, Gandhi matters for his pioneering of non-violent techniques of protest, or satyagraha; for his willingness to stake his life in the cause of religious peace and religious pluralism; for his respect for other living beings and for the earth; for the transparency and honesty of his personal and public life. For these reasons, and more, Gandhi matters, still.
Edited excerpts from historian Ramachandra Guha’s speech on the International Day of non-violence, delivered at the United Nations on September 30