GREAT SAINT

Evening Star, Issue 20958, 24 November 1931, Page 13

GREAT SAINT

GANDHI THE MAN HIS PLAGE IN INDIA For a dozen years now the name Gandhi—one pronounces it with a long “a,” as in father—has been to us here as a black storm cloud on the horizon; to much of the outside world he has been a source of the keenest interest. For twenty years before the war he was anathema to South Africans, writes Lieutenant-colonel E. G. Hart, D. 5.0., Reader in Indian History at Dublin University, in the ‘ Daily Telegraph ’ Who and what is this curious little wisp of a man—he weighs under seven stone and is little over sft in height—whom we see so often pictured seated cross-legged, nearly naked, toothless, spectacled, bat-eared, and with a cheerful, kindly smile? He was born nearly sixty-two years ago in a little native State on the West Coast of India, where his father and grandfather had been Diwan, or Prime Minister. Not, that this implies high caste: Gandhi belongs to the third of the four orders, and his dark skin shows that he is far from being of pure Aryan descent. But if courage, sincerity, generosity, and good manners go to make an aristocrat, then surely never a finer has sprung from the soil of India. One may honour a foe, and Gandhi is, as man, very well worth our honour. That his policy is wrong and bad for his country, and for a world that is so keenly in need of peace just now, seems equally true. That there should be this inconsistency is by no means strange. It is character that brings a man success, far more than brains, as is only too painfully apparent in whichever direction one looks, and Gandhi, whilst by no means deficient in intelligence—indeed, he has a surprising amount—lias also most curious blanks, like finding a sixth form boy not knowing the capital of France. • MODERN LIFE. Ho cannot, for instance, see that the majority of mankind, even his beloved rural India, lias no desire to go backward five thousand years, and will on no account do so. Yet this is the end at which he is aiming. He has come to the conclusion that what is wrong is modern civilisation. The British connection, he thinks, shackles that civilisation on India; with Swaraj— Homo Rule—there is a big charce, ho thinks of throwing ■it off. Here, again, his intelligence is at fault. Time and again he has tested his countrymen out. and they have failed hini. He has seen this, acknowledged it in speech and writing, a’’d yet goes on again to do the same thing. His great Non-Co-operation movement of 1920-2], of which the first part was to get all those holding titles and honours, all lawyers, and all students, to give up the titles, resign their practices, and leave the Government schools and colleges, resulted in only 160 lawyers, out of 60.000, and 1,700 students, out of some 8,000,000 obeying his orders. There was immense vocal enthusiasm, but little practical sacrifice. In 1918 ho wrote: 11 In travelling all over India I have come to realise that all the existing agitation is confined to an infinitesimal section of our people who are really a mere speck in the vast firmament. Tens of millions of people of both sexes live in absolute ignorance of this agitation.”- .

That, of course, was before he had begun his great campaign. Yet in December, 1928, at the Congress at which the ultimatum was issued to us to give Swaraj in a year, or else civil disobedience would begin, we find him saying: “ In the present state of the country, when we cannot trust our brothers alid our sisters, our parents and party leaders, or anybody else; when we have no sense of honour, and when we cannot even allow our words to remain unaltered for twenty-four hours, do not talk of independence.” GREAT INFLUENCES. My quotation is taken from the ‘lndian Review’ of January, 1929, a strongly Nationalist paper, and it should be remembered that it is addressed. not to Indians at large, but to the Congress members in particular. The great influences which have moulded Gandhi have been books, not men, though the personal examples of bis father and mother seem to have unconsciously affected him greatly. To Tolstoi he owes bis idea of the simple life, his great ideal. To the Sermon on the Mount he owes his idea of the means whereby to attain it— Satyagraba ; or Truth force. He is at pains to distinguish this from passive resistance, for Satyagraha bids one love one’s enemies while hating their systems and methods, and never believes in resort to violence, which he thinks Passive Resistance does. Gandhi says he is an orthodox Hindu, andipbelieres in its Scriptures, though not beyond the point at which his reason is insulted. He also believes in re-birtn, cow protection, which be interprets as taking no life, and he does Wot “ disbelieve in idol worship.” The idea of re-birth, or reincarnation, though, seems very theoretical with him. I have nowhere come across any allusion to it, yet when strongly held, as many Hindus do hold it, it profoundly alters their whole outlook, and, indeed, many historians have put down the apparently meek acceptance of foreign dominion by Mohammedan and Christian invaders from outside India during these past nine hundred years to those fundamental beliefs of Hinduism—Reincarnation and Dharma —the latter having no equivalent in English, but it " means generally religious duty and acceptance of one’s lot A REVOLUTIONARY. But Gandhi has no such idea. He is a revolutionary of the Western, tfype; only his method is that of the East, Gandhi’s influence was at its height in 1919-21. As is almost invariably the case in political trouble, there were strong underlying economic reasons then. There had been bad harvests in 1919 and 1920. Influenza had swept the country in 1918, even as it did Europe. There was the slump of 1920, with a phenomenal rise and fall of the rupee exchange, which left the trading classes badly disgruntled; there were the demobilised _ sepoys, finding life very dull in their villages after their exciting times during the war'; and last, but most important, there were some thousands, of the educated classes who had taken the places of Europeans during the war—and done their work just as well, in their own opinion—who now had to take lower seats again. Then, too, he had the Mahommedans on his side. They were anxious about the Caliphate. With the coming of Swaraj in India they foresaw themselves in a. considerable minority; they wanted all the help from outside they could get. If Gandhi'could save the Caliphate for them as a protection against his own co-religionists, they were only too pleased to help him. _ But Gandhi’s campaign failed. Three times he called it off because of the violence of ins followers. It was. characteristic of the courage and sincerity of the man thus to own himself publicly in the wroar, to do what was obviously, stupid ijrni a political point cif view, tp court the condemnation of his followers. Then came his trial in March, 1922; probably the politest trial .ever staged, with judge and prisoner;

complimenting each other, the judge consulting the prisoner as to his sentence, the prisoner askin ; for the heaviest that might be inflicted. SIX YEARS. He received six years, and seems to have been quite" genuinely pleased about it. In choosing the site for his Ashram, or religious school settlement at Sab..rmati, he mentions how glad he was to find one quite close to the goal, for, he said, a Satyagrahi must constantly be expecting to enter it. There was no fuss over his arrest. His calling off of civil disobedience the month before had disgusted many of his , most earnest followers; the others Had become convinced of its ' futility long before. Very few of the leaders of political thought had been wi J h him. Many had been actively against his policy. When he was released _ unconditionally after two years, following an operation for appendicitis, he found all he had striven for in ruins; all but a handful of his followers had deserted his cause. Presently he abdicated a leadership that was no longer his to dedicate himself to the social questions of the spinning wheel .(by which he hopes to bring India back to the simple life), to Hindu-Moslem unity,' and to the removal of “ untouchability.” But the warring parties in India presently found they had need of him again. The Simon Commission—to which no Indian was appointed—and Miss Mayo’s book, ‘ Mother India,' united them not only against the English, but against the West as a whole,' and raised a very strong party fo® Independence. - INCONSISTENCY. It was to unite this party with that? which claimed dominion status? that Gandhi was called back to take charge! at the Congress, where he spoke the words which 1 have quoted earlier. And in spite of those words he acquiesced in a resolution that made his futile struggle for independence last year a certainty. There is the inconsistency, of the man—the blank against which one comes in a nearly first-class intelligence. The Indian National Congress, onco practically the only political body in India, started by an Englishman, with the full approval of the then Viceroy, Lord Duffer in, is now but one of several such bodies, and can by no means claim to speak for a united India. That it speaks with as much authority as it does is largely due to the great homage paid by uneducated India to a great man and a very great saint, if a poor politician and statesman, whose .• aim in life differs very much from that’ 1 of th? chief leaders of the Congress. They are out to seize power for themselves; Gandhi wants it to benefit the 90 per cent, of the population—rural India. And the 'chances of looming as large on the horizon of the Round Table Conference in London as they have done on that of India during the previous few months made irresistible appeal to the Congress leaders. Gandhi, always thinking of his village India, was for a long time undetermined what course to take* Finally he planned to sail tfor England^ He has done many surprising things in' his life. Perhaps this may prove iq| the result the greatest.