“If you really want to judge the character of a man, look not at his great performances. Every fool may become a hero at one time or another, watch a man do his most common actions; those are indeed the things which will tell you the real character of a great man”. ~ Swami Vivekananda, Karma-Yoga
Every important personality in history runs the risk of being misinterpreted and misunderstood. Mahatma Gandhi is no exception. In his lifetime he was criticised rather than worshiped. After his death, he has been worshiped more often without being followed, and dismissed or misinterpreted without being read. He was an enigma to his compatriots due to his inconsistencies. In his words, “I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. When anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the latter of the two on the same subject”.
The thoughts of Gandhi are based on his instinct. He had once advised that anyone who wished to follow him after his death should simply look at what he did and how he did it, rather than look for any doctrine. He was once asked by a western reporter to convey a message to the people of India. He quickly took a scrap of paper and wrote a sentence which read: ‘My life is my message’.
The Mahatma was a completely integrated personality. He believed that life cannot be lived in compartments and tried to weave insights, derived from different disciplines. Truly, he was a practical idealist. He never did or said anything that he had not practised, and he also never expected another person to do anything which that man did not believe in. He was introspective as well as self-critical. He wrote his deeply moving autobiography titled, The Story of My Experiments with Truth ~ an authentic account of his self-introspection and experiences expressed with courage, simplicity and candour, rarely found in such books on personal history. Experiments are interactions between the self and the objective world. Indeed, his Experiments with Truth are mankind’s treasure.
The Mahatma’s personal life was a shining example of ‘simple living and high thinking’. He moulded his way of life to that of the deprived, the exploited, the poor, the hungry, the ignorant, and the daridranarayana who constituted the large majority in the country. When he on his way to attend the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, a customs official at Marseilles had asked him whether he had anything to declare. He replied: ‘I am a poor mendicant. My earthly possession consists of six spinning wheels, prison dishes, a can of goat’s milk, six homespun pieces of loin cloth and towels and my reputation which cannot be much’. He once declared, ‘If I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable so that I may share their sorrows and suffering and the affronts leveled at them, in order that my endeavour to free myself and them from that miserable condition’.
He never subscribed to the principle that the end justifies the means. To him, the means are as important as the end. “There is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the ends as there is between the seed and the tree”.
To quote Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson: “If Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had an addiction, it was to the same universe of written communication. Few have written letters as prodigiously as Gandhi, fewer with this thrift, cogency and clarity, his letters remaining, mostly, straight-laced and serious, but sometimes bursting into a laugh. There were days when Gandhi did not eat, when he did not speak. Scarce was the day when he did not write a letter” When he got tired of writing with his right hand, he used his left hand to write. He believed, “I do not feel like signing letters written by somebody else. My personal touch is lost, and a worker will not feel satisfied unless he receives the letter in my handwriting!”
Once an American journalist had the cheek to ask the Mahatma, “Mr Gandhi, do you have a sense of humour?” He looked at him for a while and replied; “If I had no sense of humour I would have committed suicide a long time ago!” In fact, his sense of humour always cheered others without hurting their feelings. In June 1942, Louis Fischer, the well-known American journalist, had to travel from Wardha railway station in a rickety tonga to meet the Mahatma at Sevegram. As soon as he entered the kutir, Gandhi sensed his discomfort and smilingly remarked: “Well, you must have travelled from the railway station in an air-conditioned coach!” Fischer was immediately able to laugh at his discomfort. One day an Italian bishop visited Sevagram to take a photograph of the Mahatma who was sitting in a corner of his cottage with a mud-pack on his shaven head to beat the intense summer heat. Gandhi greeted him with a smile ~”Why waste your film, father? People will ask you whether Gandhiji had broken his skull!”
In 1931, Gandhi visited the King at Buckingham Palace. He wore a loincloth, sandals, a shawl and his dangling watch. When a journalist made a somewhat snide remark he responded: “The king had enough on for both of us”. When a year later Winston Churchill called him a “half-naked fakir”, the Father of the Nation thanked him for the “compliment” and wrote that “he would love to be a fakir but was yet to be one”. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, “His is a liberated soul, if anyone strangles him, I am sure he would not cry. He may laugh at his strangler, and if he has to die, he will die smiling”. Bernard Shaw had once remarked that though Gandhi could commit any number of tactical errors, his essential strategy continued to be right.
India’s dominant impulse during British rule was marked by fear. He had raised his determined voice against this all-pervasive fear ~ “Be not afraid.” The essence of his teaching was fearlessness. “Cowardice is violence double distilled”.
Mahatma Gandhi did not belong to India alone. He stood for the fundamental principles that are ever so essential for the welfare of humanity as a whole. His life, his thoughts and his methods are relevant to this day. The Gandhian philosophy can be ignored only at our peril. In his tribute to the Father of the Nation on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1939, 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”.
