G andhi and His Ashrams Written by: Mark Thomson First Edition : 1993 Published by: Popolar Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. 35-C, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya Marg, Popular Press Bldg., Tardeo, Mumbai 400 034 India Gandhi and His Ashrams ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book derives from my Doctoral thesis, researched and written in India during the years 1978-82. The opportunity to live and study in India was made possible by a scholarship under the Commonwealth Scholarship and Felloweship Plan (CSFP). I would like to thank the Government of India and Australia for this support. The decision to leave my country for over four years in order to complete this work was made easier by the encouragement and support of my friend and teacher, Dr. Jim Masselos of the University of Sydney. His advice and assistance has been invaluable in producing this book. I would like to thank all the Indian Institutions and their staff that helped in obtaining research material. My host institution, the University of Bombay, and the Maharashtra State Archives were of assistance in this regard. A number of Gandhian institutions were also a great help along the way. These included Mani Bhavan in Bombay, Sabarmati Ashram and Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad, Sevagram Ashram in Maharashtra and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi in Delhi. As I resided for short periods at the two ashrams and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, I would particularly like to thank these communities for their hospitality. Several people have assisted in preparing and proofing the various drafts of the book and I thank them all. Above all, it would have been a much more unruly document without my father’s proof reading and advice on the text. Lastly, I would like to thank family and friends in India, Mauritius and Australia for their support and encouragement. I cannot do justice in words to the debt of gratitude I owe my wife, Carolie. This book is dedicated to here. www.mkgandhi.org Page 2 Gandhi and His Ashrams INTRODUCTION Since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's death in 1948 his life and thought have continued to be the subject-matter of extensive study. The rich and diverse legacy he left behind has provided a seemingly inexhaustible source for research scholars. From the publication of the first biography of Gandhi in 19091 to the present day, his way of life and philosophy have been chronicled and analysed more extensively than any other twentieth century figure. By the time of his return to India from South Africa in 1915 he was already known around the world as an ascetic revolutionary. The main body of writings about Gandhi are in the form of complete biographies, brief biographical essays, personal memoirs, and articles and treatises on his moral, political, economic, social and educational thought, which he designated his philosophy of satyagraha or truth-force. As Gandhi became a figure of world renown, men and women who lived and worked closely with him in South Africa and India were motivated to write biographical accounts and personal recollections of their friend, colleague and mentor. However, apart from an exceptional few, the many early biographies suffer from unevenness and lack of focus, and are often more identifiable with panegyric than historical writing. The best biographies have been written since his death, including the comprehensive study of the early and later stages of his life by Pyarelal,2 Gandhi's secretary of many years, and books by Fischer, Nanda, Ashe, Payne, together with the small but excellent study by Woodcock.3 In the preface to his penetrating biography Ashe highlights the need to define the paradoxical figure ofGandhi and demystify his ideas. This process hasgone on unabated with detailed and scholarly studies of every aspect of his life andthought; looking at Gandhi the social, religious, economic and political theorist; evaluating Gandhi the statesman, educationist, revolutionary, socialist, prophet and saint. Despite this wide-ranging body of literature Gandhi's social experimentation in the ashrams or communities he established with his followers has been www.mkgandhi.org Page 3 Gandhi and His Ashrams neglected. His pervading image in India and elsewhere remains that of charismatic leader and political revolutionary. This book is a contribution to the ongoing quest to rediscover the non-violent alternative. It tests the strength of Gandhi's claim that the ashrams were his finest achievements, and that the successes and failures of these communities were merely reflections of his own strengths and weaknesses. It is an attempt to understand the dynamics of his nonviolent philosophy of action, firstly, as the foundation of his "experiments with truth" in the ashrams he shared with his followers, and, secondly, as the guiding principle underpinning his revolutionary programmes to realise a new individual and a new society. In common with other treatises on the satyagraha philosophy this book adopts a biographical approach as a backdrop to the study of Gandhi's communitarian ideas and experimentation. His thought was inextricably bound up with his actions, and to study his theories in isolation from their practical dynamics is to deny the truth of Gandhi's claim that "my life is my message". The major sources were the correspondence and journalistic writings of Gandhi and his many colleagues and disciples who contributed in some way to the establishment and development of the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa and the Satyagraha Ashram and Sevagram Ashram in India. Whenever possible the material was supplemented by personal accounts of ashram life, interviews and questionnaire answers from people who at some stage had been intimately acquainted with ashram life. In addition, a large number of secondary sources were consulted. Throughout the writing of this book the author was ever mindful that Gandhi, in the words of George Woodcock, "never set out to develop a fixed and final doctrine, but emphasised that his practice of ahimsa or non-violence was always experimental, that his political struggle like his personal life was part of a continuing quest for Truth as manifested existentially, a quest that could never end because human understanding was incapable of comprehending the Absolute” 4. www.mkgandhi.org Page 4 Gandhi and His Ashrams NOTES 1. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (Varanasi: A. B. Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1909). 2. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi : The Early Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1965);Mahatma Gandhi : The Last Phase (Ahmedabad : Navajivan P. H., 1966), and Mahatma Gandhi: The Discovery of Satyagraha on The Threshold (Bombay: Sevak Prakashan, 1980). 3. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: New American Library, 1954); The Life of Mahatma Gandhi 2 Vols. (Bombay : Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1951); B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi, A Biography (London : Unwin Books, 1965); Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution (London : Heinemann, 1968); Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (London The Bodley Head, 1969); and George Woodcock, Gandhi (London : Fontana/Collins, 1972). 4. Woodcock, op. cit., p. 10. www.mkgandhi.org Page 5 Gandhi and His Ashrams 01. Gandhi and Community : The Formative Years The ashrams Gandhi established served as laboratories where he and his colleagues experimented with nonviolence as an alternative way of life. In these small monastic communities of men and women living according to absolute vows he sought to lay the ground-workforan egalitarian social organisation and economy, and to develop an education system that reflected the Indian genius. The ashrams provided economic and moral support as well as fostering the discipline and awareness necessary for their members to sustain grassroot civil disobedience. Gandhi saw the need in the tradition-bound, rigidly hierarchical Indian society, for a moral sanction able to inspire people to help themselves. He believed ashramic life, based on mutuality, simplicity and hard work, would nurture an asceticism that could bechannelled through positive action to reform society. This chapter seeks to illumine some of the formative influences upon the development of his ashram concept. Early Life Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869, in Porbandar, a small coastal town in the Kathiawar Peninsula in western India. The Gandhis were Modh banias, a merchant caste, who were grocers traditionally. However, Gandhi's family had become hereditary Dewans or Prime Ministers of Kathiawar. The primary written source of Gandhi's experiences as a child and youth in the middle-class Hindu-Jain environment in Kathiawar during the 1870s and 1880s is his autobiography which was written many years later, as he was approaching sixty. There is little doubt that these early recollections were adapted to meet the moral needs and practical expediences of the period duringwhich he wrote. Memories can connect past and present happenings and are an important part of the actuality in which they emerge. The book was written in serial form as a vehicle of self-appraisal and self-analysis, and as a moral and spiritual guide for his followers. Though many of the events described have most likely been distorted by memory, the book furnishes important insights into the www.mkgandhi.org Page 6 Gandhi and His Ashrams phenomenon of Gandhi's development as a social and political activist and theoretician, and stands as a poignant study of the religious impulse in man. Gandhi's parents were devout followers of Vishnu, the Hindu god who, it is believed, from time to time became incarnate to rehabilitate the world. His father was a righteous man who regularly went to the temple, heard religious discourses and towards the end of his life devoted much of his time to religious matters. Gandhi admired his father who clearly had qualities of leadership and was greatly respected in the community, but his mother had the strongest moral and spiritual influence upon him. She was a member of a small sect known as the pranamis who mingled Hindu and Muslim beliefs and practices. The basic tenets of the sect sought harmony among all faiths and simplicity of living. The latter involved vegetarianism, abstention from all stimulants, and periodic fasting, all of which his mother observed strictly. "The outstanding impression my mother has left on my memory is that of saintliness" recalled Gandhi, "she would take the hardest vows and keep them without flinching."1 Above all it would seem Karamchand Gandhi and his wife Putlibai bequeathed their son a heightened sense of morality and truth. Both had earned a reputation for honesty and wise counsel. Gandhi revealed his rebellious nature at a young age. Though brought up in the lap of Hindu orthodoxy, the reformism of the pranami doubtless exercised some influence upon him. While he retained his attachment to certain ascetic forms of Hindu tradition, religious ritual had no appeal for him, and he was not afraid to break with tradition when his chosen path diverged. Erikson, in his psycho- analytical study of Gandhi, suggests that the childhood events Gandhi chose to recount in his autobiography in themselves reveal a man who "is early and painfully conscious of a special mission", and "that he had to contain a superior energy which he later called truth-force and endowed with a discipline".2 To overcome his shyness and timidity, forinstance, he was encouraged by a school- mate to take up meat- eating. It was believed in certain reformist circles that the strength of the British was due to their meat diet. Gandhi thus broke the strict taboo of his community for a short period with a sense of patriotic duty, www.mkgandhi.org Page 7 Gandhi and His Ashrams believing that to free India from the occupying power would require strong young men. He eventually gave up the "reform" because of the pain of lying to his parents.3 While Gandhi was not as a youth an especially devout Hindu, he was devoted to his parents. In their company he absorbed ideas that were later to provide him with a foundation on which to develop his own concepts. Tolerance towards all religions was a principle Gandhi learnt from them. They regularly visited temples of other sects and were themselves frequently visited by Jain monks. Organised under Mahavira in the sixth century B. C., Jainism had a strong appeal to the bania merchant communities of Gujarat. "Jainism was strong in Gujarat, and its influence was felt everywhere and on all occasions", wrote Gandhi.4 Concepts such as ahimsa (literally meaning "absence of desire to kill") and the Jain doctrine of anekantavada (the many-sidedness of reality) may have been discussed within Gandhi's hearing. Though he was unaware of their impact, these early contacts with Jainism were probably instrumental in preparing his untrained mind later to accept the truth of the Jain teaching of the soul: Religion is not different sets of opinions. Religion is not just reading or memorising books known as scriptures or just believing everything said in them. Religion is the quality of one's soul and exists among men in a visible or invisible form. Through religion we are able to know our duties as human beings. Through religion we can recognise our true relationship with other living beings. It is obvious that this is not possible at all as long as we do not know our selves. Therefore, religion is that discipline of spiritual self-perfection through which we are able to know our own selves.5 Vaishnavites, Saivites, Jains, Muslims and Parsis were all welcome in the Gandhi household. During his father's three-year confinement to bed before he died Gandhi served as nurse. As his health deteriorated Karamchand became preoccupied with religion. On many occasions Gandhi was present in the sickroom, washing and massaging his father's feet and legs while friends and priests of different faiths read scriptures and discussed religion with his ailing www.mkgandhi.org Page 8 Gandhi and His Ashrams father. A friend named Ladha, who purportedly had cured himself of leprosy by constantly chanting the Ramanama (or the name of Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu), would read the Ramayana to Gandhi's father. As a child Gandhi had taken comfort from an old nurse who suggested he repeat the Ramanama to quell his fear of ghosts and spirits. It was a superstitious rather than a devotional act, but this early experience accounts for his "enraptured" listening to Ladha. "That laid the foundation of my deep devotion to the Ramayana", he wrote.6 In terms of the two main currents of Hinduism in Gujarat, Gandhi was not attracted to the ritualistic, non-ascetic and caste-conscious tradition of the upper-class Vaishnavas worshipping Krishna (another incarnation of Vishnu). He disliked the "glitter and pomp" of the temple ritual and questioned the legitimacy of untouchability. On the other hand, there was much in the worship of Rama that appealed to him; it had strong moral undertones, it was anti- caste, less ritualistic, more ascetic and a religion of the common people. Yet Gandhi was by no means convinced of the reality of God. Tolerance towards other religions had not enhanced his own faith in a divine being. On the contrary, he recollects that reading the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu, a Hindu lawgiver with divine sanction), particularly the story of creation, had turned him "somewhat towards atheism".7 Throughout his early life Gandhi had a predilection for moral teachings. From among the many plays he must have seen asa child he recalls the play of Shravana, which exemplifies heroic parental devotion, and the play of Harishchandra, which enshrines truth above all other values. The theme of truth as the expression of the Absolute in man occurs again and again in the account of his childhood and youth, suggesting that underlying his religious thinking was a moral sensitivity, a preoccupation with right action, with ethics. Truth became the focal point of his own unique philosophy of moral action.8 Pyarelal has suggested that the traditional Indian joint family, in which Gandhi grew up, provided him with an excellent preparatory training for community living and for understanding the subtleties of human relationships. Pyarelal www.mkgandhi.org Page 9 Gandhi and His Ashrams equated the running of a joint family with managing a small kingdom with anunwritten constitution; love and morality being the only sanctions available to the family head. Of necessity family members "develop the attitude of mutual help and regard, the capacity for give-and-take, and adjustment to one another's idiosyncrasies". To achieve harmony in this confined world, observed Pyarelal, "requires infinite patience, resourcefulness and knowledge of humannature", combined with a "meticulous regard for detail and perfection in performance of the littlest of the little things". Pyarelal believed Gandhi inherited many of these attributes from his father, and that the passion for ceaseless experimentation in community living as a part of his experiments with truth, the urge to live not only for mankind but in mankind and the time and care that he devoted in later years to the trivia of Ashram life had their seed in the tradition of the joint family that surrounded his early childhood.9 Much of Pyarelal's analysis is doubtless accurate. Yet he has drawn an idealistic picture of the extended family system and itsefficacy in preparing children to "live not only for mankind but in mankind". The rules of conduct in a joint family are prescribed in sacred books and have been practised in India for centuries. Ideally, the individual is given a supportive framework and opportunity to be self-realised, and in return make an ongoing contribution to the maintenanceof the family unit. The value of cooperation is given precedence over individualism for the good of the whole. However, in practice, it is not uncommon to find that individual members, and this is particularly true of female and junior male members, have involuntarily to suppress their own individuality. Co-operation within the family is not based on the recognition of equality of status and the rights of its members, but, rather, as S.C. Dube points out, on the recognition of four principles. These are respect for age, respect for position in the scale of kinship, superiority of the male and finally, the necessity of keeping certain matters confined to the responsible members of the family, or, at the most within the family.10 Often members of the family are given very little responsibility in the management of the household orfamily www.mkgandhi.org Page 10