MahatmaGandhi and His Apostles — It long seemed that Mahatma Gandhi could not be comprehended by the Western mind. Having arisen in a culture that had so little in common with our own, and being an anomaly even within that culture, he was a shining but enigmatic figure. Millions of words were writ- ten about Gandhi, millions of his own words were recorded by his disciples, some fourhun- dred biographies of him were published, and — he wrote an autobiography yet he eluded us. He loomed large, and we knew that he was regarded variously as a great political leader, a great spiritual leader, a sage, a visionary, a — prophet, a saint, Christ, a god yet he re- mained an abstraction. The man himself, though he lived in our time, was lost to us. Ved Mehta, born in India, educated in England and America, an author equally at home with Eastern and Western thought, whose intellec- tual and moral interests span the two cultures and who has written brilliantly about both, was almost inevitably drawn to the task of recovering for us Gandhi as a human being, of making the unintelligible intelligible. With a devotion and a literary seriousness worthy of this transcendent subject, Mr. Mehta has set down a clear, enthralling ac- count of Gandhi's life, separating fact from myth and casting light on Gandhi's principles and his purposes, his ideas and, most impor- tant, his actions: as Mr. Mehta says, the way to holiness, for Gandhi, "lay not in withdraw- al from the world but in immersion in the — world" in action. He did not merely formu- late principles; he embodied them. In Gandhi's mind, political and religious aims became iden- tical, and means and ends virtually identical. He dedicated himself to truth, to nonviolence, to celibacy, to control of the palate, to pov- erty, to scripture-reading, to humility, to hon- esty, to fearlessness: truth and nonviolence became the forces governing his civil-disobe- dience campaigns against injustice, against op- pression, against conflict between Hindu and Muslim. In order, while it was still possible, to talk with relatives and disciples of Gandhi because, as Mr. Mehta says, "it is in the mem- ories of his closest followers that the pictures (Continuedon backflap) Jacketdesign byGuyFleming 0177 PRINT MEHTA, Ved Parkash 92 Mahatma Gandhi and his topy apostles 1 DATE DUE PRINT 92 G MEHTA, Ved Parkash Mahatma Gandhi and his apostles Copy 1 //^ Sis** * Tvr~ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from National Federation of the Blind (NFB) http://archive.org/details/mahatmagandhihisOOvedm Mahatma GANDHI and His Apostles Books by Vcd Mehta Face to Face Walking the Indian Streets Fly and the Fly-Bottle The New Theologian Delinquent Chacha Portrait of India John Is Easy to Please Daddyji Mahatma GANDHI 4o ft and His Apostles VED MEHTA THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK 6 © Copyright 1976 by Ved Mehta All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in anyform First published in 1977 by The Viking Press 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company ofCanada Limited LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGINGINPUBLICATIONDATA Mehta, Ved Parkash. Mahatma Gandhi and his apostles. Includes index. 1. Gandhi, Moh—andas —Karamchand, 1869-1948. 2. Statesmen India Biography I. Title. DS481.G3M43 954-03'5'0924 [B] 76-2773 ISBN 0-670-45087-1 Printed in the United States ofAmerica The text of this book originated in The New Yorker. — ACKNOWLEDGMENTS During the more than five years that this book was in the making, I relied for support on theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Founda- tion, which appointed me a Fellow (1971-1972), and on the Ford Foundation, which awarded me an extended Travel and Study Grant (1971-1976); presumed upon the good will of hundreds ofGandhi's disciples and followers, all ofwhom contributed to my knowledge but only a few of whom could be directly introduced in the text (some Rajagopalachari, M. A. Abdullah, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Sucheta — Kripalani, RaihanaTyabji have since died); enlisted the aid ofa pha- lanx of readers, amanuenses, typists, and editorial assistants, notably Doreen Beck, who helped me revise and distill the week's work every Saturday; benefitted from the comments of, among others,Judith M. Brown, of the University of Manchester, and Hugh Tinker, of the University of London, each of whom read sections of this book in proofs; and freely/called upon the grammatical expertise of Eleanor — — Gould Packard and for want of a better phrase the editorial guid- ance of William Shawn. To all of them: I thank you for your voices, thank you, Your most sweet voices. Ved Mehta New York City