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Gandhi as a father

Gandhi's relations with his four sons were also flawed. Gandhi seemingly played the role ofVictorian paterfamilias, but his sons all suffered from his refusal to allow them any formal educationand his failure to find time to put his own theories of private education to the test. He put difficultiesin the way of their marriages. Manilal (b. 1892) had to wait until he was 35; Ramdas (b. 1897) until

he was 30; Devadas (b. 1900) sought a love match with the daughter of C. Rajagopalachari,Gandhi's outstanding advocate and ally in South India, an inter-caste marriage, which Gandhiinsisted on delaying, although he was eventually to give his consent.

It was Harilal, the eldest (b. 1888), who rebelled against his father, using the occasion of marriagein 1911 to break away and go to live in Calcutta. Gandhi's refusal to support Harilal's secondmarriage in 1918 led to his increasing drunkenness and debt: when he converted to Islam in 1938Gandhi ascribed it to mercenary reasons. He died shortly before his father's assassination.

Ramdas (b. 1897) remained with Gandhi in the first of his Indian ashrams; the two other sons tookup journalism - Manilal (b. 1982) as editor ofIndian Opinion in South Africa, Devdas with theHindustan TImes. The family eventually settled down but, to quote Ashe again, 'it was sober-spirited, a little sad'. Gandhi had taken his duties as 'householder' (the second stage in the Hindu

life-cycle) in all seriousness, but it was an 'experiment' of limited success. This account of his familylife still leaves unchartered any description of the fashioning of Gandhi's ideology - his social andpolitical philosophy. To probe further into the matter, let's begin with Gandhi's education. After hisprimary school, he went to Alfred High School which was an English medium school (where all thelessons were in English). There he was introduced to various English trappings, e.g. playingcricket ,and was thus acculturated in the society as a 'Brown Briton'. Then the family decided thathe pursue his higher education in England to guarantee himself the place of the Dewan in thefuture. For this, he was ostracized by his modh-bania community in September 1888. He enrolledat the Inner Temple, where his 'higher education' culminated with examinations in Roman andCommon Law. He qualified in June 1890. He also took the University of London matriculation, withLatin, French, English Language, History, Geography and Science, among his subjects. No teacherseems to have left at any stage any special impression on the young Gandhi: intellectual stimuluscame from elsewhere. Nonetheless, his legal practice and training gave Gandhi a 'British' identity

he was not to cast off until some 15 years later, long into his stay in South Africa.

His years in London were of utmost importance in shaping his conscience and bringing him closerto the philosophy he was to follow. It was then, through his joining the 'London Vegetarian Society',that he was introduced to the ideas of two writers who were greatly to influence his ideology andthe style of work - Tolstoy (1828 - 1910), Russian aristocrat, novelist and moralist, and Ruskin(1819 - 1900), one of the great Victorian moralists, a social thinker, an art historian and critic. Buthe came to learn how highly some Europeans regarded the Hindu religion and philosophy when hemet Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant of the Theosophical Society.

(The Theosophical Society had been founded in America by a Colonel Olcott, but moved itsheadquarters to India in 1882. The quest of the society was spiritual and their growing aim was todiscover a new 'world teacher'. It was Madame Blavatsky who especially emphasized the

importance of Indian religions;Annie Besant, ex-atheist and champion of birth-control, took over therunning of the Theosophical society in Madras and was later to become a leading figure in theIndian National Congress. Gandhi himself only ever became an associate member of the society,and this was for but a six-month period in 1896 when he was in Durban.)

Gandhi discovered the Bhagvad-Gita when he worked as a Sanskrit translator for someTheosophical Society friends of his. (The Gita, part of the Indian religious classic - TheMahabharata, is one of the most sacred texts of Hinduism). Gandhi read Tolstoy's 'The Kingdom ofGod is within you'in Durban, quite shortly after its publication and translation into English in 1894.The book changed Gandhi's outlook towards his life and turned his conscience towards the

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philosophy of non-violence - the philosophy he was to depend too much on. This was the work thatoverwhelmed me and left an abiding impression.

If Gandhi's religious beliefs were not founded on the traditional texts, there was one work thatprofoundly influenced his practice, the 'Bhagvad-Gita'. Here again, however, his interpretation washighly original. The Gita is a central text in the Vedantic culture of modern India. It seems clear that

it is a conservative defense of dharma: the warrior, Arjuna, on being confronted by the moraldilemma of whether to fight his relatives seeks the advice of the god Krishna; he is told that hishigher loyalty is to his caste dharma or duty as a Kshatriya or warrior and that he must fight.

Admittedly he is admonished that he must do so with no pursuit of personal gain, in a spirit of non-attachment. Krishna instructs Arjuna : 'Prepare for war with peace in thy soul. Be in peace in

pleasure or pain, in gain and in loss, in victory or in the loss of a battle. In this peace there is no sin'.Possibly such language permitted Gandhi his own idiosyncratic interpretation. Krishna, he believed,was in fact advocating non-violent action.

The poem should be seen, according to Gandhi, as a commentry not on a real battle but on aninternal one within the soul. Krishna sees Arjuna as 'merely the means of my work' and this may bethe clue to Gandhi's extracting from the text his belief in the dynamics of means shaping ends. Ifthe prevailing orthodoxy in modern Hinduism is Vedantic, based on the Vedas and essentially other

worldly in outlook, the thrust of Gandhi's philosophy was quite otherwise. He belonged to arelatively neglected part of the Hindu tradition, to the Karma-Yogi, a tradition of action, of anessentially 'this worldly' approach. Admittedly he drew on a similar tradition of ascetic practices ortapas (tapascharya were the meditations and austerities of the saints); devotion to satya andahinsa are paramount examples, brahmacharya another. Gandhi had a Hindu view of time, seeingthe world as caught up in a vast cyclical process, with the present age, the Black or Kali Yuga age,some five thousand years old. He thus did not share the ninteenth-century Western faith in a linearview of progress. His vision was arcadian, a looking back to an age of truth, to Satya Yuga, whenthe Kingdom of God, or 'Ram Rajya', had been realized on earth. Yet he shared the views of anearlier utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, that immediate steps could be taken to realize utopia.

Gandhi's was to be a lifetime of testing out means, of experiments. One such experiment had beenhis Vegetarianism in London, the beginning of a lifelong experiment with diet. The most formative

years of Gandhian experimentation in means, or different sorts of action, were to be in South Africa,'that God-foresaken continent where I found my God'.