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# 2020-01-27 - Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer
I found this book in the local library discard pile. It had several
biographies of Gandhi and i decided that this one suited me best.
The book was very long for my tastes, but i was inspired by the
narration of the author. It touched me more than the movies have.
Gandhi was born in 1869. Louis Fischer spent time with Gandhi in his
ashram on multiple visits.
My notes follow below.
# Chapter 3, Mohandas K. Gandhi, attorney at law
Gandhi advanced in greatness by doing. The Gita became Gandhi's
gospel, for it glorifies action.
# Chapter 4, Gandhi and The Gita
Gandhi felt the Gita was allegorical for internal conflict within the
hearts of people. The Gita condemns inaction. It advocates
selflessness in action. The renunciation of the Gita is the litmus
test of faith. One who is ever brooding over results often loses
nerve in the performance of duty. Renunciation gives the inner peace
and spiritual poise to achieve results. Gandhi advocated perfect
ahimsa (non-violence). Since we are all bits of God who is perfect,
how can we and why should we kill? Gandhi summarized detachment in
one word: Desirelessness. The yogi's highest reward is to become so
firmly united with God so as to need never again return to the status
of migrating mortal.
# Chapter 9, The transformation begins
Gandhi said that book Unto This Last by John Ruskin marked the
turning point in his life. He immediately decided to change his life
in accord with the ideals of the book. He also took a vow of
celibacy at age 37 that he kept for the rest of his life.
# Chapter 11, Gandhi goes to jail
There was nothing passive about Gandhi. He disliked the term
"passive resistance." He offered a prize for a better name for this
new kind of mass-yet-individual opposition to government unfairness.
He arrived at Satyagraha. Satya is truth, which equals love. Agraha
is firmness or force. Satyagraha is truth-force or love-force.
"A Satyagrahi," Gandhi said, "bids goodbye to fear. He is therefore
never afraid of trusting the opponent. Even if the opponent plays
him false twenty times, the Satyagrahi is ready to trust him for the
twenty-first time--for an implicit trust in human nature is the very
essence of his creed."
Optimism about human nature was the starting post of all Gandhi's
activities; it sometimes made him sound naive.
> Death is the appointed end of all life. To die by the hand of a
> brother, rather than by disease or in such other way, cannot be for
> me a matter of sorrow. And if, even in such a case, I am free from
> the thought of anger or hatred against my assailant, I know that
> will redound to my eternal welfare, and even the assailant will
> later on realize my perfect innocence.
This, Gandhi declared, is one of the virtues of Satyagraha: it
uncovers concealed motives and reveals the truth. It puts the best
possible interpretation on the opponent's intentions and thereby
gives him another chance to discard baser impulses. If he fails to
do so, his victims see more clearly and feel more intensely, while
outsiders realize who is wrong.
Many Christian clergymen supported him. They saw Satyagraha as
Christianity in action against a system that merely called itself
Christian. Gandhi worked through moral conversion. ... No true
devotee of Christ could resist this.
# Chapter 20, First fast
"I fasted to reform those who loved me," Gandhi said on a subsequent
occasion, and he added, "You cannot fast against a tyrant."
# Chapter 22, The history of British rule in India
From remote antiquity to modern times, India has been invaded
twenty-six times. The British invasion was the last. Alexander the
Great invaded India in 326 B.C., at the age of thirty. After a
nineteen months' stay, Alexander, a pupil of Aristotle, left for
home, taking with him several Indian philosophers. He died two years
later in Babylon.
The Greeks, and subsequently the Romans, carried to the West the
achievements of Indian science. The so-called "Arabic" numerals were
invented in India. The zero is an Indian concept. An Indian brain
likewise evolved the present worldwide [base 10] system of numeral
placement: the system whereby a one with a four after it is fourteen
and a four with a one after it is forty-one.
On July 8, 1497, Vasco da Gama in three Portuguese ships, the largest
of which displaced 150 tons, anchored off the southwest shore of
India. Thus began the first seaborne invasion of India.
The Papal bulls of 1493 and an agreement with Spain gave Portugal,
then a world power, a Catholic monopoly in southeast Asia. This did
not prevent the Dutch from establishing several lucrative trading
posts in India early in the sixteenth century. The French followed a
few years later. They sent home pepper, cinnamon, and other spices.
England hesitated to encroach on the formidable Portuguese. Instead,
since they had wool to sell which torrid southern Asia did not need,
the British searched for a northwest passage through North America
and a northeast passage around northern Europe to the colder regions
of China. But when this quest proved vain, England, emboldened by
her victory over the Spanish armada in July, 1588, dared to defy
Portugal, Spain's confederate, and dispatched her first expedition
into the Indian Ocean in 1591. Despite the war with Spain and
Portugal, other British expeditions followed. The peace signed with
these nations increased the traffic and intensified the commercial
competition.
An East India Company was formed in London in 1600; its renewed
charter in 1609 gave it a British trade monopoly in Asia unlimited in
time and space.
Wars, intrigues with Indian provincial warlords, and shrewd trading
filled the coffers of the East India Company and enhanced its power.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, England was importing
cotton piece-goods, indigo, drugs, lac, sugar, and carpets from
India. Indian calicoes were a special favorite with British
housewives. In return, the company brought India broadcloth,
industrial metals, and gold.
Feuds between the Moslem or Mogul emperors of India and the warlike
Maratha Hindus of south-central India, in the area centering on
Poona, east of Bombay, enabled the Company to proclaim the fusion of
money-making and imperialism; it announced in December, 1687, that it
proposed to create such civil and military institutions "as may be
the foundation of a large, well-grounded, sure English dominion in
India for all time to come."
The accretion of British power moved with accelerated speed. The
process was simple: early in 1749, for instance, Prince Shahji,
native potentate of the state of Tanjore, on the southeast coast, was
dethroned by a rival; he offered the British a town called Devikottai
at the place where the Coleroon River empties into the Bay of Bengal
"on condition," says The Cambridge History of India, "of their
helping him to recover the throne." After a few days of siege,
Devikottai surrendered. "The English kept it with the country
belonging to it; and as for Shahji," the British chronicle notes, "no
one thought of restoring him to his throne."
Anybody wronged by the British was wooed by the French, and vice
versa.
William Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal, continued the
policy of British expansion through armed force, enforced tributes,
and dynastic conspiracies. His trial in England, which lasted from
February, 1788, to April, 1795, showed that the British
administration in India was neither scrupulous nor incorruptible, nor
concerned with the welfare of Indians.
Gradually, by means mostly foul, but considered normal in that age
and place, the British established themselves throughout the length
and breadth of the vast Indian subcontinent.
While India was being subjugated, the invention of the spinning jenny
in 1764, Watt's perfected steam engine in 1768, and the power loom in
1785 were converting England into a maker and exporter of textiles.
Indian cotton goods were no longer wanted in Britain; on the
contrary, Britain exported textiles and other factory products to the
people of India who, in 1800, numbered approximately 140,000,000.
India's industries consequently languished; Indian treasure flowed to
the British Isles as profit or plunder. Indian handicrafts suffered
too. India was transformed into a purely agrarian country whose
villages, overcrowded by the influx of unemployed townsmen, could not
produce enough food. According to a British source, the deaths from
famine in India between 1800 and 1825 were one million; between 1825
and 1850, four-hundred-thousand; between 1850 and 1875, five million;
and between 1875 and 1900, fifteen million.
Engineered by wit and violence, England's annexations in India in the
latter part of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the
nineteenth left many disgruntled and dispossessed native rulers.
British attempts to introduce law and order and an equitable system
of taxation further irritated innumerable persons nursing innumerable
wounds. Widespread economic stringency intensified the general
unrest. Only a spark was needed to produce a flame. India had not
yet become totally docile, nor had the British learned the technique,
which they subsequently mastered, of firm yet smooth and barely
visible administration.
It was 1857, and a Hindu prophecy declared that on the centenary of
the Battle of Plassey in 1757, British rule would perish. A war,
officially called the Mutiny or the Sepoy Mutiny, broke out. ... Rail
and telegraph lines were out. Both sides committed numerous murders.
Much blood also flowed in pitched battles and sieges.
The mutiny was unplanned, unco-ordinated, leaderless, and hopeless.
Inevitably, after many months, the British, aided by loyal Indians,
suppressed it. With the restoration of peace, the East Indian
Company [was blamed] and abolished. In 1858, Queen Victoria assumed
the government of India and appointed Lord Canning her first Viceroy.
For eighty-nine years thereafter, until August 15, 1947, India was a
colony of the British Empire.
The blood-and-plunder period was ended. England's ideals of clean
government filtered into the British administration of India. The
British watered some deserts and improved communications. Many
British officials, after twenty or thirty years' service in India,
felt at home in India and like foreigners when they went home to
England. They were devoted to India. They ate out their hearts and
ruined their health coping with difficult problems.
The British in India, however, were a fifth caste, the first caste.
They interdined with Indians perfunctorily and intermarried
seldom[ly]. The British were the super-Brahman-Kshatriyas; all
Indians were "untouchables" The British were in India, never of
India. The British were masters in somebody else's home. Their very
presence was a humiliation. Despite the best intentions of the best
among them, their every act was a humiliation. Then they complained,
with pain, that Indians were "ungrateful." The complaint was a
measure of the lack of understanding.
Even if the British had converted India into a land flowing with milk
and honey they would have been disliked. Imperialism, like
dictatorship, sears the soul, degrades the spirit, and makes
individuals small, the better to rule them. Fear and cowardice are
its allies.
The requirements of British prestige hurt Indian pride. Subjection
stimulated a desire for liberation.
This is why colonial administration never is, and never can be,
successful. History has known no good colonizers. Every empire digs
its own grave. Imperialism is a perpetual insult, for it assumes
that the outsider has the right to rule the insiders who cannot rule
themselves; it is thus arrogant nationalism and inevitably begets
opposing nationalism.
Unloved and unwanted, the British found it dangerous to arouse too
many expectations of self-government and inconvenient to kill too
many hopes for it. Hence, all the eighty-nine years of British rule
constitute a series of oscillations between bold promises and
disappointing performances.
Similarly, Britain divided the country between British India,
governed directly by England, and native India, governed indirectly
by England, but directly, and ostensibly, by Indian princes. It was
a cynical device, avowed as such by Lord Canning on April 30, 1860;
he wrote, "It was long ago said by Sir John Malcom that if we made
all India into zillahs [or British districts] it was not in the
nature of things that our empire should last fifty years; but that if
we could keep a number of native states without political power but
as royal instruments, we should exist in India as long as our naval
supremacy was maintained. Of the substantial truth of this opinion I
have no doubt; the recent events make it more deserving of our
attention than ever."
Professor Rushbrook Williams, a brilliant Englishman who often served
as official intermediary with Indian princes, wrote in the London
Evening Standard of May 28, 1930, "The situations of these feudatory
states, checkerboarding all India as they do, are a great safeguard.
It is like establishing a vast network of friendly fortresses in
debatable territory. It would be difficult for a general rebellion
against the British to sweep India because of this network of
powerful, loyal, native states."
In 1939, India, with three times the population of the United States
and two-thirds the area, had 41,134 miles of railroad track, compared
with 395,589 miles in the United States. India produced
2,500,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electric energy in 1935; the United
States, 98,464,000,000 kilowatt-hours.
These conditions were not the sole fault of the British. Indians
shared the blame. But Indians blamed everything on the British.
# Chapter 33, On the way home
[Rolland asked] "What do you call God? Is it a spiritual personality
or a force which rules over the world?"
"God," Gandhi replied, "is not a person... God is an eternal
principle. That is why I say that Truth is God... Even atheists do
not doubt the necessity of truth."
# Chapter 34, Climax
Gandhi took the hard road. His doctrine was: By their works shall ye
know them. His God required him to live for humanity. "If I could
persuade myself," Gandhi wrote, "that I should find Him in a
Himalayan cave I would proceed there immediately. But I know I
cannot find him apart from humanity."
Gandhi's relation with God was part of a triangle which included his
fellow man. On this triangle he based his system of ethics and
morality.
The first duty of the God-worshiper is truth: for truth is God.
"There should be Truth in thought, Truth in speech, and Truth in
action," Gandhi wrote in From Yeravda Mandir.
# Chapter 35, Without politics
Gandhi was more specific, however, in an address at the Y.M.C.A., in
Colombo, Ceylon, in 1927. "If then," he said, "I had to face only
the Sermon on the Mount and my own interpretation of it, I should not
hesitate to say, 'Oh, yes, I am a Christian.' ... But negatively I
can tell you that much of what passes as Christianity is a negation
of the Sermon on the Mount. And please mark my words. I am not at
the present moment speaking of the Christian conduct. I am speaking
of the Christian belief, of Christianity as it is understood in the
West."
But Gandhi frowned on proselytizing, whether by Christians, Hindus,
or Moslems. He said, "I do not believe in people telling others of
their faith, especially with a view to conversion... Faith does not
permit of telling. It has to be lived and then it is
self-propagating."
# Chapter 38, My week with Gandhi
At seventy-three, Gandhi never reminisced. His mind was on things to
come. Years did not matter to him because he thought in terms of the
unending future. Only the hours mattered to him because they were
the measure of what he could contribute to that future.
Fearing nothing, he could live the truth. Having nothing, he could
pay for his principles.
Mahatma Gandhi is the symbol of the unity between personal morality
and public action.
Gandhi enriched politics with ethics. His greatness lay in doing
what everybody could do but doesn't.
# Chapter 43, Gandhi revisited
Jesus was a Jew. He was the finest flower of Judaism. You can see
that in the four stories of the four apostles. They had untutored
minds. They told the truth about Jesus. Paul was not a Jew, he was
a Greek, he had an oratorical mind, a dialectical mind, and he
distorted Jesus. Jesus possessed a great force, the love force, but
Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West. It became
the religion of kings."
He inquired about the treatment of Negroes in the United States. "A
civilization," he said, "is to be judged by its treatment of
minorities."
# Chapter 44, Pilgrim's progress
Would literacy help, Gandhi was asked. He held that it was not
enough. The Germans were literate yet they succumbed to Hitler. "It
is not literacy or learning that make a man," Gandhi said, "but
education for real life. What would it matter if they knew
everything but did not know how to live in brotherliness with their
neighbors?"
author: Fischer, Louis, 1896-1970 |