Power Through Renunciation   

Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009

GANDHI: THE MAN, HIS PEOPLE, AND THE EMPIRE
by Rajmohan Gandhi
University of California Press, 2008

Review by Michael N. Nagler  

Having read all the standard biographies of Gandhi, as well as written a forward to the one that best captures his spiritual practice and spiritual significance (Gandhi the Man, by my teacher, Eknath Easwaran), I was not prepared to be as educated, entertained, and inspired as I was by this mighty work of his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi (hereafter referred to as RG). RG combines scholarly competency (he is a research professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) with unique access to many records of his famous and well-documented grandfather (including a priceless photo of himself as a child whose grandfather is showering him with love). More importantly—for it can be disastrously hard to understand Gandhi, no matter how well informed one is—he combines objectivity with devotion, managing to present the human side of the Mahatma along with his incredible greatness and accomplishments in a way that enlarges our imagination of what it means to be a human being. If Jesus had had such a biographer, I mused, rivers of blood shed in bitter debates over the Savior's godhood or manhood or both could have been spared.

A close reading of this book brings home to us King's declaration that if we want to live in peace—or live at all, I would add—"Gandhi is indispensable."

I'm inclined to start with some insights into the Mahatma's leadership—and a new anecdote for me about it. Upton Close, an American Far East expert who met and admired Gandhi, wrote, "What was his secret? I think my wife discovered it. She said, ‘In his presence I felt a new capability and power in myself rather than a consciousness of his power. I felt equal, good for anything—an assurance I had never known before, as if some consciousness within me had newly awakened.'"

The popular image of saintly Gandhi as a timid, "good" person who would not hurt a fly is of course drastically mistaken, arising as it does from our distorted (I almost said perverted) belief that violence is the only form of power. This belief invites us to assume that if a person is not violent, he or she must be weak—an idea that this book debunks soon enough. When the intercommunal violence that even Gandhi could not quell raged as India was torn apart in the act of independence, he wrote to colleagues, "there is such a fire raging in me that I [will] know no peace until I have found a solution for all this.... If I find that my comrades are deceiving me, I will be furious and I shall walk barefoot on and on through hail or storm. I would throw away the soft seat and other amenities which you have offered me."

Yet Gandhi gained his great power not by grabbing for it, as I would be inclined to do, but by renouncing it—exactly the opposite of our "normal" human response to challenge. When a prayer meeting he was conducting in Rajkot, Gujarat, was being broken up by a 600-strong mob of reactionaries swinging swords and lathis (clubs), the nearly seventy-year-old Gandhi stood still, closed his eyes and repeated his mantram ("Rama") with a force of devotion noticed by a young follower who had rushed to his side. Then, the prayer having worked, Gandhi dismissed all the coworkers who were trying to protect him and put himself entirely at the disposal of the mob, saying to one who was in his vicinity, "I wish to go under your sole protection, not co-workers." RG quotes the young worker's eyewitness report that, "to everyone's amazement the thugs' violence melted like ice [and] the leader of the gang stood before Bapu with folded hands."

Writing to his nephew Maganlal from Champaran, the scene of one of the early triumphs of Gandhi's Satyagraha (nonviolent resistance) in India, Gandhi said of the great poet-saint of medieval Rajasthan: "Mira was stabbed with the dagger of love ... if we too can get at this dagger ... we can shake the world to its foundations." And it seems that's exactly what he did. Of all the commentators and biographers who have dared to tread on the baffling episode of Gandhi's final yajña (sacrifice) during the extreme violence of partition, RG is the only one I know of who I believe has got it right. Here is the story.

Touring violence-torn Noakhali in Bihar, Gandhi had his grandniece Manu sleep alongside him. Both slept without clothes. Why? And why just then? Many of Gandhi's closest followers could not understand and begged him to stop the practice, but Gandhi had long since ceased to obey any but the "still small voice" within him. And while he did not launch into justifications, it's pretty clear what he was trying to accomplish. A secretary at the time, the brilliant and skeptical scientist N.K. Bose, "one day overheard Gandhi saying to an associate about brahmacharya [control of sexual and other passions], ‘If I can master this, I can still beat Jinnah' [his great adversary over Pakistan]." Trying to interpret this for an earlier, western biographer, another secretary, Pyarelal, explained: "Gandhi is under his own complete control. That generates tremendous energy and passion."

Throughout the book, RG brings his cultural insights and perspective as a fellow Indian to bear on this paradoxical dynamic of "renounce and enjoy" (a favorite line of Gandhi's from the Isa Upanishad). RG has done us a great service. His detailed but readable, fact-filled but insightful work enables us to peer through various windows into the person who, at least as I believe, wielded the most powerful, inventive spirit for good the modern world has seen.

Michael Nagler is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, founder and president of the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education (www.mettacenter.org), and author of The Search for a Nonviolent Future.