The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi - Essay Example

 Gandhi There is little doubt that Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) has had a significant impact upon modern history, particularly as it applies to India, but also as it applies to the rest of the world as his ideas regarding peaceful protest helped inspire great leaders of other nations. Most people tend to think of him as an emaciated old man in traditional robes who seemed incredibly out of touch with the modern era. However, Gandhi grew up knowing the life of privilege, worked as a lawyer for many years supporting his own affluent household and purposely set out on a course of self-sacrifice and hardship only after discovering he was not satisfied with this life of ease (Martin, 2000). Having developed his ideas in South Africa, Gandhi remained committed, through numerous internal and external trials, to his fundamental Hindu beliefs – that love could indeed conquer all – all of which contributed to his ability to change the world. His life ended with an assassin’s bullet on January 30, 1948. The militant who shot him blamed Gandhi for the weakening of India yet today Gandhi is hailed as the father of India and has inspired numerous individuals to lead further social reform in other parts of the world. Building off of his early childhood influences and religious ideals, Gandhi accomplished the changes he did by putting together logical strategies for non-violent political action as a means of addressing humanitarian concerns in both South Africa and India. The main beliefs Gandhi held related to his firm conviction that Indians, as British subjects, were every bit as worthy of fair treatment as whites. He did not feel the Indians should be granted special privileges as is shown in an early statement regarding poverty: “[W]hile the poor man must strive to improve his condition, let him not hate the ruler and wish his destruction … He must not want rulership for himself, but remain content by earning his own wants. This condition of mutual cooperation and help is the Swaraj [freedom] of my conception” (Arnold, 19). Gandhi’s early traditions taught him to revere all life and he remained a vegetarian for most of his life as a result. He also envisioned the goal of life to be recognition of one’s duty toward others and responsibility to uphold the truth. Early in his life, he managed to apply one of the stories from the Bhagavad Gita to his own life. “Gandhi saw the battle in which Arjuna was engaged as an allegorical, not an actual, call to arms, a demonstration of the supreme importance of following one’s dharma through renunciation, selflessness and, in his interpretation, strict adherence to non-violent action” (Arnold, 33). Becoming disillusioned with the comforts of wealth and what he saw as the questionable joys of sex caused Gandhi to make a major shift in his life while he still lived in South Africa. “Gandhi’s continuing study of the Bhagavad Gita and the Sermon on the Mount, with its message that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’, further led him to the conclusion that the life to be aspired to was one of selfless action in the service of one’s fellow men, and the best method of righting wrongs was to protest non-violently and to suffer lovingly rather than submit to injustice” (Arnold, 55). He quit his law practice, took a vow of abstinence from the indulgence of desire (not just sex but other things too) and became more committed to human rights issues. The main strategies Gandhi developed to bring Indians together in an attempt to gain India’s freedom from British imperialism were put together in South Africa. He started his protest efforts with letters to newspapers and by publishing his own newsletters, but these had little effect. “In his early years in South Africa he was a committed believer in constitutional methods, in petitions and the power of the press” (Arnold, 50). The strategy Gandhi developed was termed Satyagraha, which he characterized as being diametrically different from what was called passive resistance. “Satyagraha differs from passive resistance a the North Pole from the South. The latter has been conceived as a weapon of the weak and does not exclude the use of physical force or violence for the purpose of gaining one’s end, whereas the former has been conceived as a weapon of the strongest and excludes the use of violence in any shape or form” (Gandhi, 6). As it evolved, Gandhi’s strategy followed a basic pattern. The first step of protest was the careful evaluation of a situation. This was followed by very careful study of the situation so that all the variables were understood, injustices documented and productive solutions discovered. Once all the objectives and potential consequences of disobedience to existing laws were understood, the official objectives of the campaign were to be stated, clearly and publicly so everyone, protestors, opposition and uninvolved but perhaps affected citizens, knew the situation. This also gave the opposition the chance to open negotiations and perhaps find a means of reaching peaceful agreement. Throughout this process, communication lines to the opposition had to be kept open to facilitate any possible negotiation efforts and the focus could remain on solving the issues rather than creating enemies. Gandhi advocated fair treatment of opposition regardless of what was done to protestors. The idea of how to carry these protests through might have been inspired by his early examples. His mother reportedly routinely fasted to make a point. The idea of a nonviolent protest or sit-in might have occurred to Gandhi as a result of watching the Banias and other merchant and moneylender castes of his region while growing up employ these techniques. These individuals would sit in a prominent place until the individual either capitulated or public attention became focused in a process called sitting dharma (Martin, 2000). Gandhi used it not to collect money owed, but to bring about change. These tactics also included attempts to prove to Britain that India could stand on its own through his organization of ambulance campaigns or attempts to recruit Indians to help in Britain’s war efforts. Despite these tactics, Gandhi’s non-violence was sometimes met with extreme violence, such as at Amrister. “The massacre sent shock waves throughout India, arousing intense anger and deep antagonism of British Rule” (Arnold, 111), eventually causing him to discontinue these campaigns in favor of pursuing national independence. However, through his experience in India, it was learned that non-violence might not be completely effective in a single short-term campaign, but several episodes of sporadic resistance and struggle could achieve the end. In addressing the problems of the very poor, both in India and elsewhere, Gandhi based his opinion largely on the writings of philosophers Ruskin and Carpenter, each of whom condemned industrialization as destroying the fabric of the old order. “It is machinery that has impoverished India,” he said, pointing to the various ways in which traditional Indian textiles and handicrafts have become industrialized products created elsewhere, leaving many Indians without jobs (Arnold, 68). If machines could produce the fine weavings and other textiles of the nation, they could do so anywhere, even in Britain. Thus, not only were the factories taking livelihoods out of the villages, but they were taking them out of the country altogether while also cheapening the product so that true handmade items were no longer feasible to create. Based on these ideas, he envisioned the small villages of India as the last holdouts of a ‘pure’ India. “In their poverty and hardship, the peasants represented for Gandhi people free from the taint of luxury and self-indulgence” (Arnold, 76). However, these people were harshly treated by the Western approach to taxes such as the Salt Tax, in which all people, regardless of income or need, were taxed on salt and were prohibited from processing their own. The Salt Tax “was repeatedly criticized (not just by Indians) as an immoral tax on a basic human necessity and ‘cruel’ imposition that fell with particular severity on India’s poor” (Arnold, 145). In this, as in many other things, Gandhi saw the actions of government as first stealing from the people something that was already theirs and then making them pay for its return. Understanding Gandhi may take much more than a single lifetime of study into the activities and writings of this man; however, a great deal can be learned about him by examining important elements of his life for evidence of his basic beliefs, his strategies and his stance on specific issues. His underlying beliefs did not include the concept that all men were created equal, as he seemed to firmly believe in the rigid caste system of his birth and didn’t seem too interested in working for the disenfranchised poor black people of South Africa. However, he did feel that people of specific class or civilized structure should be treated as equals such as the Indians of South Africa and the Britons, all of whom operated under the same political leadership and paid the same costs of allegiance to the crown. When his efforts to demonstrate Indian equality failed to draw the attention of the British legal system, Gandhi resorted back to the strategies he’d learned as a child, adapting them and modifying them as he went into order to bring about change. First working for relatively small concerns using a strategy of non-violent opposition developed in South Africa, Gandhi soon found himself using these same tactics in India to encourage the nation’s poor to resist British oppression. When this finally proved unsuccessful and he was forced to re-evaluate his techniques during a two year jail sentence, Gandhi emerged with the understanding of the need for cycles of constitutional process as a stage in the non-violent campaign. Finally, as he became more familiar with the plight of the poor, Gandhi began to understand it not as a problem of lack of morality and ethics on the part of those affected, but rather as a question of economics as they were repeatedly and harshly oppressed by those above them, Indian and British. His famous Salt March demonstrated his final understanding of the need to find a common issue that actually harmed the poor that they could get behind in order to galvanize them into action as well as the degree to which a simple tax such as the salt tax could introduce significant hardship into a poor household. Works Cited Arnold, David. Gandhi. New York: Longman, 2001. Gandhi, M.K. Non-Violent Resistance. New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2001. Martin, Christopher. Mohandas Gandhi. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2000. Wolpert, Stanley. Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Read More