Gandhi outside India
This writing has not the pretention to be a journalistic nor academic article about Gandhi, but only a collection of thoughts and reflections about his life and philosophy, to express what the name of Gandhi represents outside his native India.
The historical background of India, when Gandhi was born, is that of a nation surrendered to a foreign rule, the British Empire, and where the generation of cultivated Indians, instead of rivaling an unfamiliar rule, were eagerly fond to submit to the “Civilizing mission” of their foreign masters. In this way, political power was strengthened by moral and intellectual servility. The British Empire in India seemed to be safe for centuries.
When Gandhi died, India was a free nation where millions of disarmed people had made their voices heard, fought peacefully a desperate battle against a world power and won; their former attitude of servility had evolved in a process that made them achieve a moral force such as to require the attention and admiration worldwide. Gandhi was the main character on the scene of this great evolution process, but it would be an error to think that he was the unique responsible for this magnificent achievement.
No single personality, however great and brilliant, can be the exclusive builder of a historical process. A succession of remarkable predecessors and elder contemporaries had quarried and broken the stones which helped Gandhi to pave the way for India's independence. They had set in motion various trends in the intellectual, social and moral consciousness of the people which the genius Gandhi gathered together and headed in an imposing march. Among them, we may consider Raja Rammohan Roy , Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and his great disciple, Swami Vivekananda , Swami Dayananda Saraswati , Dadabhai Naoroji , Badruddin Tyabji , Syed Ahmed Khan , Ranade , Gokhale , Tilak , Aurobindo Ghosh and Rabindranath Tagore , to name only a few. Each one of them had created in his own field a consciousness of India's destiny and helped to generate a spirit of sacrifice which, in Gandhi's hands, became the instruments of a vast political and moral upheaval.
Despite his whole life was dedicated to India and his own people, the relevance of his life is not confined within the borders of his country: future generations will remember him not only as a politician, patriot or nation-builder but essentially as a moral force calling to the conscience of Man, and therefore universal. His vision of Man transcended the limits and barriers of nations, religions, race or sex, giving the world a great lesson of respect for mankind in a beginning of century so awfully ravaged by the myth of pure race, tragical nationalism and Holocaust and whose madness ended in one of the darkest pages of contemporary history. In this regard, the lesson of his life and teaching are not only for Indians but his message could be certainly considered universal.
Another lesson of his life which should be of universal interest is that he was not born a genius and did not show in early life any extraordinary faculty that is not shared by the common run of men. If there was anything extraordinary about him as a child, it was his shyness, a handicap from which he suffered for a long time. No doubt, something very extraordinary must have been latent in his spirit which later developed into an iron will and combined with a moral sensibility made him what he became, but there was little evidence of it in his childhood. We may therefore derive courage and inspiration from the knowledge that if he made himself what he was, there is no visible reason why we should not be able to do the same. His genius, so to speak, was an infinite capacity for taking pains in fulfillment of a restless moral urge. His life was one continuous striving, an unremitting sadhana, a relentless search for truth, not abstract or metaphysical truth, but such truth as can be realized in human relations. He climbed step by step, each step no bigger than a man's, till when we saw him at the height he seemed more than a man. "Generations to come, it may be, will scarce believe", wrote Einstein, "that such a one as this, ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." If at the end he seemed like no other man, it is good to remember that when he began he was like any other man.
Such is the great lesson of his life. Fortunately, he has himself recorded for us the main incidents of his life till 1921 and described with scrupulous veracity the evolution of his moral and intellectual consciousness.
India of my dreams
“I shall work for an India in which the poorest shall feel that it is their country, in whose making they have an effective voice, an India in which there shall be no high class and low class of people, an India in which all communities shall live in perfect harmony... There can be no room in such an India for the curse of untouchability or the curse of intoxicating drinks and drugs... Women will enjoy the same rights as men... This is the India of my dreams.”
This was India in Gandhi’s mind and for this ideal he fought. Today it might seem natural to aim at such an ideal but we must remember how different was India in his times. Society was divided in castes and the gap between high and low classes might seem as wide as the ocean. In one of the last notes left behind by Gandhi in 1948, he expressed his deepest social thought in this way: "I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it? Will it restore him [her] to a control over his [her] own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melt away."
India is more than a nation, it is a subcontinent where people of different traditions, history, languages and religions live side by side, and often this coexistence wasn’t peaceful as men are likely to consider differences as something menacing their social stability and identity and need to be educated to reflect on the spiritual richness that may derive from mutual understanding and living in harmony. He considered untouchability a curse where for most of his contemporaries this idea may have seemed something blasphemous. But Gandhi’s thought was steadily firm on this issue: “Assumption of superiority by any person over any other is a sin against God and man.” Not only the claim of superiority had a religious implication, it also involved an inner contradiction: “He who claims superiority, by the very nature of the claim forfeits it. Real, natural superiority comes without the claiming.”
Also, we must notice the modernity of his thoughts about the relationships between men and women. As we have seen before, Gandhi was not the first in India who tried to improve women conditions. His predecessors banned cruel practices like sati and stressed the importance of education for women but their conditions were still far away from the right to equality with men. Those were the days in which Britain knew the passionate call for equality of Virginia Woolf and universal suffrage extended to women in most occidental countries was approved in the second decade of the 20th century . In Gandhi’s words, men and women are complementary, even with their natural differences, both necessary to the development of social life: “Just as fundamentally man and woman are one, their problem must be one in essence. The soul in both is the same. The two live the same life, have the same feelings. Each is complement of the other. The one cannot live without the other's active help.”
This was the dream, and with Gandhi India’s dream came true.
One world
At the closing session of the Inter-Asian Relations Conference held on April 2, 1947 at New Delhi, Mahatma Gandhi spoke to over 20,000 visitors, delegates and observers. Even if he tried to prepare his speech in advance, he wasn’t reading the words he had wrote but the message he wanted to spread was clearly impressed in his memory. Personally, I find this speech very significant beyond the splendid message, as far as we may appreciate the communication skills of Gandhi. The shy boy that he was once, has become the Mahatma. For a long while his talking focuses on communication: as an experienced lecturer, he is well aware of the importance of language in relation with the recipients of his message. To make his message understood he needed two conditions to meet: his voice to be well heard and a common language to share his thoughts with an international audience. For me, it is thought-provoking that as a premise he said “Well, if my voice doesn't carry, it won't be my fault, it will be the fault of these loudspeakers.” Those words may be interpreted as a sign of the simplicity and clearness of his speech: if the audience will not understand his message of love, nobody could put the blame on him, his voice is loud and clear so it will be the fault of the loudspeakers.
Gandhi as a young student lived in England so we may assume that he knew very well English; nevertheless, he seems to be uneasy using this language, as if he would like to speak in his mother tongue but at the same time he was aware that it won’t be understood. We can feel in his words a sense of cultural inferiority but it’s not so for himself, instead he regrets that culture comes to India through English books: ” All this rich knowledge, I am sorry to say, comes to us here in India through English books, through English historians, not that there are no Indian historians, but they also don't write in their mother tongue[…]No, they give us what they have studied through English books, than, perhaps through originals, but through English in the English tongue, that is the cultural conquest of India, that India has undergone. But they tell us that wisdom came to the West from the East.” So wisdom is something different from the simple knowledge, it is the spiritual teachings of the great religion founders – Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses , Jesus, Mohammad, not to mention all Indian spiritual guides or lights, as he calls them, mostly unknown to the West. We may say with Horace: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio .
“And then what happened? Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West. I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my reading. […]I tell you this story in order to hearten you, and in order to make you understand, if my poor speech can make you understand, that what you see of the splendour and everything that the cities of India have to show you, is not real India.” Real India was not what his audience might find in the towns and eastern spirituality couldn’t be seen “through the Western spectacles”. “Therefore, I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West.”
Asia has to conquer the West: a strong message given in a moment in which India was still struggling for his independence, but it wasn’t meant as a military conquest. Asia has to conquer the West by its spirituality, that is the message of Love, of Truth, that the West must learn again. Again, yes, because these Asian spiritual giants taught their lessons of love to mankind but the West forgot it and now has nothing to teach to the world but its gun-powder, its atom bomb. War, destruction, carnage is exactly the opposite of truth and love, in this way there can’t be any knowledge nor wisdom. So the message is meant not only for the West, to stop with this madness, but for all Asian peoples, not to imitate the West in his foolishness.
I felt the need to report truthfully this first part of Gandhi’s speech because it may illuminate us and let us fully understand the most famous part of this speech, the famous statement of “One World”. Without this premise we may misunderstood the true meaning of what follows. What is the meaning of “One world” then? Since the beginning of his speech, Gandhi went on pointing out the differences between West and East: military power against domination, language rivalry between French and English on the international scene against incomprehensibility of Indian (and in a more general way, of Asian) languages, richness against poverty, cultural superiority against intellectual servility, rationalism against spirituality. And what gained the West with all this? War, destruction, dictatorship, false idols to worship. And the East can’t stand staring at this madness without doing nothing. East must look at its origins, at its spirituality and find a different way, to save itself and save the West too. East must lift up its head and let its heart talk and give to the world a message of Love. Because West and East are not two different world, they share a common wisdom they learnt from the same spiritual masters, and in this meaning there is ONLY ONE WORLD.
Actually, it is a very inspiring message, destined to remain impressed in the hearts as Gandhi wished, his words are not gone with the wind. In recent years the audio of this speech has been recovered and it has been used in a commercial spot aired by Italian TV’s: famous director Spike Lee found in Gandhi an icon of communication at its highest levels and combined his image to that of a multinational society of communication services, Telecom. It may be interesting to notice how Gandhi’s speech is shortened and in some way disfigured but his greatness may appear even more clearly when the closing message is displayed: let’s watch the video
As you can see, Gandhi is imagined as he really was in his times, but his message is enhanced by today technology: a webcam, a widescreen in a square, computers and so on. The closing sentence in Italian is: “If he could have communicated in this way, what would the world be like today?” My answer is: the world today seems to be still too frightened by the power and the modernity of Gandhi’s message and still not ready to put it into practice. To explain why I say this, let’s see how director Spike Lee arranged the “One World” message, which was its original meaning and what it became cutting after cutting:
“If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of 'Love', it must be a message of 'Truth'. There must be a conquest [clapping], please, please, please. That will interfere with my speech, and that will interfere with your understanding also. I want to capture your hearts and don't want to receive your claps. Let your hearts clap in unison with what I'm saying, and I think, I shall have finished my work. Therefore, I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West. Then, the question that a friend asked yesterday, "Did I believe in one world?" Of course, I believe in one world. And how can I possibly do otherwise, when I become an inheritor of the message of love that these great un-conquerable teachers left for us?”
In the original speech, Asian people are supposed to give a message to the West; also, the reference to the conquest of the West by a conquering moral force coming from East is omitted, definitely too awkward and irritating. Not to say that here Gandhi considers himself as the inheritor of the message of Love of the great oriental teachers mentioned above: without these details, the message comes out irremediably distorted. If today our hearts are still not ready to clap in unison with Gandhi’s words – all his words and not an inaccurate summary – I’m sad to have to say that really his work is not accomplished, as he warmly desired.
