What are we to make of Gandhi's life? How should we judge
this homespun-wearing politician-saint, the man who brought down
an empire by preaching brotherhood and nonviolence? At the very end,
with his beloved India reaping its own destruction, Gandhi considered
himself a failure. But his place in history is secure, and it
does not diminish his greatness to point out that in some respects, he had failed.
He had spent his life working toward the achievement of independence
for India without violence or division–"you can cut me in two if
you wish," he famously told Muhammed Jinnah, "but don't cut India
in two." Yet in the end, he was forced to watch as his newborn
country was torn by one of the great human calamities of the century.
Gandhi had made India ungovernable for the British, but in the
autumn of 1947, it became ungovernable for anyone.
If his political dream was in some sense a failure, so
too was his dream of an India cleansed of the age-old inequities
of caste and prejudice, and yet uncorrupted by modern technology
and industry. He imagined a country where countless Indian peasants
wove their own clothes and tilled their own land, without what
he considered the ruinous effects of modernity. But after his
death, history passed him by: his great disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru,
was an ardent socialist, and by the 1950s Nehru's five-year plans
were turning India into an industrial state–and eventually, a nuclear
state. Meanwhile, the iniquities of class and gender that he had
so loathed persisted, even into the 21st century.
Yet Gandhi had to aspire as high as he did to achieve
what he did; indeed he won triumphs for India that less idealistic
leaders would never have dreamed possible. No one did more than
Gandhi to improve the lot of poor Indians, and if his dreams fell
short of reality, it was not because the dreams were flawed, but
because the human race, which he loved so much, could not rise to
the standard he set. It is true that India split after independence,
but without Gandhi's labor, without the power of his person, there
would have been no India at all. The nationalists of the Indian
National Congress fought for independence, but they were, and always
would be, a Westernized elite, out of touch with the vast masses
inhabiting the real India. It was Gandhi, the Mahatma, who made
the people of the subcontinent believe in the idea of an Indian
nation; indeed, it was he, the frail, bespectacled figure with the
simple clothes and the ready smile, who embodied this idea throughout
the long decades of struggle.
To the Indian people, Gandhi gave a nation. To the world,
he gave satyagraha, arguably the most revolutionary
idea of a long and ravaged century. He showed that political change
could be affected by renouncing violence; that unjust laws could
be defied peacefully and with a readiness to accept punishment;
that "soul-force," as much as armed force, could bring down an
empire. He drew this lesson from his readings of the Bible and
Tolstoy and the Bhagavad-Gita, and he taught it
to Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and countless other
political protestors who would follow his example in the years
to come. In some sense, Gandhi's greatest achievement lay in his
legacy; for his ideals, and the example he provided in living them
out, inspired, and continue to inspire, people of all nations to
take up the peaceful struggle for freedom from oppression.
