Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles
It long seemed that Mahatma Gandhi could not be comprehended by the Western mind. Having arisen in a culture that had so little in common with our own, and being an anomaly even within that culture, he was a shining but enigmatic figure. Millions of words were written about Gandhi, millions of his own words were recorded by his disciples, some four hundred biographies of him were published, and he wrote an autobiography—yet he eluded us. He loomed large, and we knew that he was regarded variously as a great political leader, a great spiritual leader, a sage, a visionary, a prophet, a saint, Christ, a god—yet he remained an abstraction. The man himself, though he lived in our time, was lost to us. Ved Mehta, born in India, educated in England and America, an author equally at home with Eastern and Western thought, whose intellectual and moral interests span the two cultures and who has written brilliantly about both, was almost inevitably drawn to the task of recovering for us Gandhi as a human being, of making the unintelligible intelligible.
With a devotion and a literary seriousness worthy of this transcendent subject, Mr. Mehta has set down a clear, enthralling account of Gandhi’s life, separating fact from myth and casting light on Gandhi’s principles and his purposes, his ideas and, most important, his actions: as Mr. Mehta says, the way to holiness, for Gandhi, “lay not in withdrawal from the world but in immersion in the world”—in action. He did not merely formulate principles; he embodied them. In Gandhi’s mind, political and religious aims became identical, and means and ends virtually identical. He dedicated himself to truth, to nonviolence, to celibacy, to control of the palate, to poverty, to scripture reading, to humility, to honesty, to fearlessness: truth and nonviolence became the forces governing his civil disobedience campaigns against injustice, against oppression, against conflict between Hindu and Muslim.
In order, while it was still possible, to talk with relatives and disciples of Gandhi—because, as Mr. Mehta says, “it is in the memories of his closest followers that the pictures live, the myths take shape, and his message is propagated”—Mr. Mehta spent several years travelling through India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, England, and Austria, among other places, to collect the oral testimony of living Gandhians. From these precious conversations and an enormous body of research, Mr. Mehta has fashioned a biographical portrait unlike any other. It shows the man who was, in Nehru’s words, a “pilgrim on his quest for Truth, quiet, peaceful, determined, and fearless”; it shows the leader who, in Einstein’s words, “demonstrated that a powerful human following can be assembled not only through the cunning game of the usual political maneuvers and trickeries but through the cogent example of a morally superior conduct of life”; and it shows this life, which, in Mr. Mehta’s own words, fused “ancient Hindu religion and culture and modern revolutionary ideas about politics and society.” Ved Mehta describes the symbolic gestures that moved hundreds of millions of Indians—the fasts, the protest walks, the acts of passive resistance which led to imprisonment—and also describes, in the most precise particulars, the daily life in Gandhi’s ashrams, the everyday behavior he expected of his followers and demanded of himself. Mr. Mehta makes his way confidently through the paradoxes and contradictions, the complexities, the tragic and sublimely comic aspects of Gandhi’s unique existence. He describes Gandhi’s efforts to do away with the institution of untouchability by making himself, in effect, an untouchable; and his fight—again, by example—to change his country’s appalling sanitary conditions.
Gandhi set his country upon a spiritual course from which it has been deflected but to which all India’s well-wishers hope it will return, if not in this century, then in centuries to come. Reading what Mr. Mehta has written gives us some reason to hope that Gandhi and his teachings will one day prevail; one can certainly believe that as long as men and women inhabit the earth Gandhi will continue to be a presence among them.