Mahatma Gandhi and Soul Force

Gandhi shows us that the power of Jesus' words transcends the Christian label. However, he also raises questions about how to balance idealism and pragmatism in our ethical decisions.

Image Credit: https://www.onthisday.com/people/mahatma-gandhi

I have recently had cause to reflect more closely on the life and legacy of Mohandas Gandhi after listening (and re-listening) to Zach Cornwell’s excellent podcast series Conflicted: The Partition of India. Mohandas Gandhi—the “Mahatma”, or “Great Soul”—is probably familiar to nearly everyone, even those who could not locate India on a map. For one thing, he had a very long, Oscar-winning movie made about him. For another, this famously ascetic advocate of spiritual truth and material simplicity, who walked barefoot, spun his own cloth, and distilled his own salt out of seawater, bafflingly was resurrected to make a posthumous plug for iMacs. If you are an American or Canadian, the amount you know about Gandhi may be limited—as one of my admiring high school classmates put it, “He’s just like Jesus in a loincloth!”—but you almost certainly know something. Most people view Gandhi with a vague sense of admiration—a man of conviction whose diminutive stature belied his titanic satyagraha or “soul-force”—or, as Winston Churchill derisively put it, the “naked fakir” who nonetheless brought the once-mighty British Empire to its knees.

But, of course, no human can be reduced to a simple snippet, and Gandhi, like all of us, contained worlds: beauty and ugliness, inspiration and cautionary tale. As Cornwell puts it, “Mohandas Gandi was a bundle of contradictions: strong, yet frail; moral, yet rigid; playful, yet puritanical; inspirational, yet controversial.” The ironic result of his tireless efforts to achieve Indian independence was that, though the British left without a fight—an almost unparalleled achievement in human history—as soon as they were headed for the door, his own countrymen were at each other’s throats in one of the great and largely unsung tragedies of the 20^th century. Over less than two years, perhaps as many as two million people were killed and ten million displaced as neighbors that had lived side by side for generations divided themselves into warring teams—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—for a zero-sum battle to the death. And while the frail Mahatma used every weapon in his non-violent arsenal to stem the tide of communal hatred and violence in his country, he was powerless to stop it.

This story of Indian partition, of course, is much bigger than a simple biography of Gandhi. Conflicted flits between equally fascinating characters such as Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India (whom fans of the Netflix series The Crown may have recently become acquainted with), and his charming wife Edwina; Jawaharlal Nehru, the debonaire playboy who became the worldly, politically savvy yang to the otherworldly Gandhi’s yin in the drama of Indian independence, and served as the first prime minister of India until his death in 1964; and the irascible Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who almost single-handedly brought about the partition of the Indian subcontinent into two separate nations: the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan. Nonetheless, Gandhi’s scrawny shadow looms large over the story of Indian independence, and it is impossible to tell this story without him. His example shows both the power and the limits of moral suasion.

Mohandas Gandhi was born in 1869 (four years after the end of the American Civil War). Twelve years before Gandhi’s birth, in 1857, India had been shaken by a massive rebellion. Millions of Indians, fed up with the exploitation of their nation at the hands of the British East India Company and wary of foreign encroachment on their cultural and religious traditions, attempted to throw off the British yoke. At the cost of 800,000 Indian dead, they partially succeeded: following the rebellion, the British crown disbanded the East India Company and took direct control of India, beginning the period known as the British Raj. In theory, it should have been an improvement; after all, what historian Alex von Tunzelman described as a “private empire of wealth unburdened by conscience” had been replaced by an empress who at least in theory was obligated to care for the welfare of all her subjects. Practically, however, little changed. As Cornwell explains, “By the end of the 19^th century, India was Britain’s biggest source of revenue, the world’s biggest purchaser of British exports, and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers, all at India’s own expense. Indians literally paid for their own oppression. And it was a level of oppression that was abundantly clear to 45-year-old Mohandas Gandhi.”

Gandhi, by this point, was intimately acquainted with the oppression that British colonialism was capable of inflicting on its subjects. After studying law in London, he moved to the British colony of South Africa to practice. It was there, according to Cornwell, that he had his “first eye-opening brush with bigotry” when he was thrown off a first-class train car in 1893. Gandhi realized that, to his colonial overlords, he was indistinguishable from the dark-skinned “Bantus,” as indigenous South Africans were categorized.

Yet, if his experience of discrimination and oppression came from the West, so too did the inspiration for its solution. In the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi encountered the ideas of Jesus and took them seriously: far more seriously, in fact, than most self-identified Christians did. Most Christians patronizingly dismiss the Sermon on the Mount’s admonition to “turn the other cheek” as impractical: a rhetorical flourish simply meant to highlight our own inability to reach the standard of morality that God requires. Former Southern Baptist leader Russel Moore even said that, when he quoted Jesus, he often got pushback for using “liberal talking points.” By contrast, Gandhi—a Hindu—saw in the words of Jesus the means to change the world. He saw power—soul force—strong enough to face down the weapons of the mightiest empire the world had ever seen.

So, when he returned to India to face down the injustices suffered by his own people, he brought this counter-intuitive weapon with him. When British forces under the command of the trigger-happy and cold-blooded Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed and peaceful crowd that had assembled in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar in violation of newly-enacted British laws restricting the rights of Indians, it was at least in part Gandhi’s influence that prevented the reaction to the Amritsar Massacre from flowering into another bloody rebellion. Instead, seeds of a different kind of resistance began to germinate: nonviolent non-cooperation. The British took Indian cotton cheap and sold it back at a hefty profit as textiles; the Indians would retaliate by hand-spinning their own cloth. The British demanded a tax on salt; the Indians would distill their own from seawater. The British relied on Indian civil servants to keep the machinery of state working; a critical mass of these servants just needed to decide not to cooperate. Little by little, the great cash cow that was the British Raj would stop giving milk. And when empire struck back in the only way that it knew how—brute force—Gandhi and his disciples would take their blows and refuse to back down or retaliate.

The result was success that defied all previous rules of statecraft. As historian MJ Akbar (quoted in Conflicted), writes, “Between 1757 and 1858 the British lost an occasional battle, but never a war, against the most powerful princes of India. They would eventually be defeated in 1947, but by a concept that they could never fully comprehend: non-violence.” Their failure to comprehend it is especially sad and ironic, given its roots in the religion that they claimed to be representing.

I would love to end the story here, to draw the curtain on Gandhi’s legacy with strains of the closing stanza of “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” playing softly in the background: “The wrong shall fail,/the right prevail,/for peace on earth, good will to men.” Unfortunately, that would not be accurate. While the Indians largely said farewell to their former British rulers with cordiality, even affection, they could not do the same for their own countrymen. As soon as the plan was announced that the subcontinent would be transformed into not one but two independent nations—a Hindu-majority India, and a Muslim-majority Pakistan—communities that had lived side by side for hundreds of years began to turn on each other with chilling ferocity. Refugees choked the roads in the borderlands of the Punjab and Bengal; entire villages of Hindus or Sikhs were slaughtered by Muslim militias; entire villages of Muslims were slaughtered by Hindus or Sikhs. Literally millions of women were raped (or committed suicide to avoid being raped) by those seeking to dishonor their “enemies” in the most humiliating way a patriarchal society could devise. “Ghost trains” were sent from India to Pakistan and vice-versa, stuffed with the corpses of murdered refugees, with the words “A gift from India” or “A gift from Pakistan” painted in blood on the side of the train cars.

Against such hatred, the little man whose soul-force had faced down the mightiest empire in history and won found himself outmatched. As he told the journalist Lewis Fisher (quoted in Conflicted), “I have not convinced India. There is violence all around us. I am a spent bullet.” This bleak self-assessment undersold his achievements—both past and yet to come—and yet it remains true that the same soul-force that had ended the Raj proved unable to end the internecine slaughter of partition. At best, it gained a pause in the killing, as when his “fast unto death” brought the violent inter-religious rioting in Calcutta to a halt. At worst, it simply contributed to the guilt and pain of those already suffering, as when he advised women to kill themselves rather than be raped.

So what are we to make of Gandhi? What are the enduring lessons that he teaches? As a Christian who takes the words of Jesus seriously and attempts (however inadequately) to put them into practice, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who lived out the sermon on the mount more fastidiously than did Mahatma Gandhi. And, as Phillip Yancey noted in his book Soul Survivor, the methods that Gandhi pioneered—the “weapons” of “prayer, fasting, prison terms, and bodies bruised from beatings”—helped liberate half a billion people in India alone, and echoed throughout the twentieth century from the Civil Rights movement in the United States to the Truth and Reconciliation commissions of South Africa to the “thousands of marchers holding candles and singing hymns [that] brought down an iron curtain that had stood for forty years.”

Yet the same non-violent philosophy that brought the Raj to its knees seems laughably naive when put against regimes that would have happily slaughtered non-violent protesters without a qualm of conscience. For example, would the world have been better off if Britain had followed his advice to allow Hitler and Mussolini to “take possession of your beautiful island” and “if they do not give you free passage you, you will allow yourself—man, woman, child—to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them”? On a personal level as well, his pursuit of spiritual perfection left a wake of casualties. How far do we take the battle against the worldly passions in our own lives, especially when they affect others—as when he unilaterally decided to embrace complete celibacy at the age of 37 without even consulting with his wife?

Phillip Yancey puts it well:

I do not write about Gandhi because he has all the answers for our planet. To the contrary, I turn to him because he asks the questions most provocatively. We may reject his answers, surely, but can we do so before first considering his questions?

Though not a Christian by belief or practice, Gandhi attempted to an impressive degree to live out some of Jesus’ principles. The Christian church, birthed in the East but fashioned in the West, shares many of the crises of Western civilization as a whole. Although some Christian leaders have addressed these issues, we have grown so accustomed to our own prophets that we no longer hear their message clearly. When a sound is too loud, sometimes we can discern it better in its echo.