George Orwell
Reflections on Gandhi
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but
the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all
cases. In Gandhi's case the questions on feels inclined to ask are: to what
extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a
humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by
sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own
principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from
coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study
Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of
pilgrimage in which every act was significant. But this partial autobiography,
which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favor, all the
more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his
life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very
shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success
as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.
At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember
reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian
newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at
that time did not. The things that one associated with him — home-spun cloth,
“soul forces” and vegetarianism — were unappealing, and his medievalist
program was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, over-populated
country. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or
thought they were making use of him. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he
was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent
violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any
effective action whatever — he could be regarded as “our man”. In private this
was sometimes cynically admitted. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was
similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him
to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have
taken their money away. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is
doubtful; as Gandhi himself says, “in the end deceivers deceive only
themselves”; but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always
handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. The British
Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in
effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.
But I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with
a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired
him, after a fashion. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious
in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. In
judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so
that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. For instance, it is clear
even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite
outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a
public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more
adequately guarded. Again, he seems to have been quite free from that
maniacal suspiciousness which, as E. M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to
India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice. Although no
doubt he was shrewd enough in detecting dishonesty, he seems wherever
possible to have believed that other people were acting in good faith and had a
better nature through which they could be approached. And though he came
of a poor middle-class family, started life rather unfavorably, and was
probably of unimpressive physical appearance, he was not afflicted by envy or
by the feeling of inferiority. Color feeling when he first met it in its worst form
in South Africa, seems rather to have astonished him. Even when he was
fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of
race or status. The governor of a province, a cotton millionaire, a half-starved
Dravidian coolie, a British private soldier were all equally human beings, to be
approached in much the same way. It is noticeable that even in the worst
possible circumstances, as in South Africa when he was making himself
unpopular as the champion of the Indian community, he did not lack
European friends.
Written in short lengths for newspaper serialization, the autobiography is
not a literary masterpiece, but it is the more impressive because of the
commonplaceness of much of its material. It is well to be reminded that
Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and
only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather
unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top
hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower
and even tried to learn the violin — all this was the idea of assimilating
European civilization as throughly as possible. He was not one of those saints
who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor
one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries. He
makes full confession of the misdeeds of his youth, but in fact there is not
much to confess. As a frontispiece to the book there is a photograph of
Gandhi's possessions at the time of his death. The whole outfit could be
purchased for about 5 pounds***, and Gandhi's sins, at least his fleshly sins,
would make the same sort of appearance if placed all in one heap. A few
cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the
maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without
“doing anything”), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth,
one outburst of temper — that is about the whole collection. Almost from
childhood onwards he had a deep earnestness, an attitude ethical rather than
religious, but, until he was about thirty, no very definite sense of direction. His
first entry into anything describable as public life was made by way of
vegetarianism. Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the
solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even
after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful,
energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping
down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser
of subscriptions. His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there
was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, and I
believe that even Gandhi's worst enemies would admit that he was an
interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive .
Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have much
for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are founded, I
have never felt fully certain.
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he
were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were
integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him
for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State
violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his
doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi's teachings cannot be
squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job
is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They
make sense only on the assumption that God exists and that the world of solid
objects is an illusion to be escaped from. It is worth considering the disciplines
which Gandhi imposed on himself and which — though he might not insist on
every one of his followers observing every detail — he considered
indispensable if one wanted to serve either God or humanity. First of all, no
meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form. (Gandhi himself, for
the sake of his health, had to compromise on milk, but seems to have felt this
to be a backsliding.) No alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even
of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely
in order to preserve one's strength. Secondly, if possible, no sexual
intercourse. If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole
purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals. Gandhi
himself, in his middle thirties, took the vow of brahmacharya, which means
not only complete chastity but the elimination of sexual desire. This condition,
it seems, is difficult to attain without a special diet and frequent fasting. One
of the dangers of milk-drinking is that it is apt to arouse sexual desire. And
finally — this is the cardinal point — for the seeker after goodness there must
be no close friendships and no exclusive loves whatever.
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on
one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing.
This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love
humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual
person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and
the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being,
love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an
inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that
on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than
administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the
threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one
gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave
the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if
the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal
food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what
we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken
broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think —
most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being
human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to
commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the
point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared
in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco,
and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing
that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one
should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily
assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of
earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult:
in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful
whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is
probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much
temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological
roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is
a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which,
sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue
whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that
they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all
“radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme
Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
However, Gandhi's pacifism can be separated to some extent from his
other teachings. Its motive was religious, but he claimed also for it that it was
a definitive technique, a method, capable of producing desired political
results. Gandhi's attitude was not that of most Western pacifists. Satyagraha,
first evolved in South Africa, was a sort of non-violent warfare, a way of
defeating the enemy without hurting him and without feeling or arousing
hatred. It entailed such things as civil disobedience, strikes, lying down in
front of railway trains, enduring police charges without running away and
without hitting back, and the like. Gandhi objected to “passive resistance” as a
translation of Satyagraha: in Gujarati, it seems, the word means “firmness in
the truth”. In his early days Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer on the British
side in the Boer War, and he was prepared to do the same again in the war of
1914-18. Even after he had completely abjured violence he was honest enough
to see that in war it is usually necessary to take sides. He did not — indeed,
since his whole political life centred round a struggle for national
independence, he could not — take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending
that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference
who wins. Nor did he, like most Western pacifists, specialize in avoiding
awkward questions. In relation to the late war, one question that every pacifist
had a clear obligation to answer was: “What about the Jews? Are you prepared
to see them exterminated? If not, how do you propose to save them without
resorting to war?” I must say that I have never heard, from any Western
pacifist, an honest answer to this question, though I have heard plenty of
evasions, usually of the “you're another” type. But it so happens that Gandhi
was asked a somewhat similar question in 1938 and that his answer is on
record in Mr. Louis Fischer's Gandhi and Stalin. According to Mr. Fischer,
Gandhi's view was that the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide,
which “would have aroused the world and the people of Germany to Hitler's
violence.” After the war he justified himself: the Jews had been killed anyway,
and might as well have died significantly. One has the impression that this
attitude staggered even so warm an admirer as Mr. Fischer, but Gandhi was
merely being honest. If you are not prepared to take life, you must often be
prepared for lives to be lost in some other way. When, in 1942, he urged non-
violent resistance against a Japanese invasion, he was ready to admit that it
might cost several million deaths.
At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was
born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw
everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The
important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly
as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the
phrase quoted above, he believed in “arousing the world”, which is only
possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to
see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of
the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again.
Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to
appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to
make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at
this moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses
could only practise civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all
of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine
famine, it would make no difference. But let it be granted that non-violent
resistance can be effective against one's own government, or against an
occupying power: even so, how does one put it into practise internationally?
Gandhi's various conflicting statements on the late war seem to show that he
felt the difficulty of this. Applied to foreign politics, pacifism either stops being
pacifist or becomes appeasement. Moreover the assumption, which served
Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or
less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be
seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are
dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler
sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the
standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole
nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a
friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?
These and kindred questions need discussion, and need it urgently, in the
few years left to us before somebody presses the button and the rockets begin
to fly. It seems doubtful whether civilization can stand another major war, and
it is at least thinkable that the way out lies through non-violence. It is Gandhi's
virtue that he would have been ready to give honest consideration to the kind
of question that I have raised above; and, indeed, he probably did discuss
most of these questions somewhere or other in his innumerable newspaper
articles. One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not
that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking. I have
never been able to feel much liking for Gandhi, but I do not feel sure that as a
political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a
failure. It is curious that when he was assassinated, many of his warmest
admirers exclaimed sorrowfully that he had lived just long enough to see his
life work in ruins, because India was engaged in a civil war which had always
been foreseen as one of the byproducts of the transfer of power. But it was not
in trying to smooth down Hindu-Moslem rivalry that Gandhi had spent his
life. His main political objective, the peaceful ending of British rule, had after
all been attained. As usual the relevant facts cut across one another. On the
other hand, the British did get out of India without fighting, and event which
very few observers indeed would have predicted until about a year before it
happened. On the other hand, this was done by a Labour government, and it is
certain that a Conservative government, especially a government headed by
Churchill, would have acted differently. But if, by 1945, there had grown up in
Britain a large body of opinion sympathetic to Indian independence, how far
was this due to Gandhi's personal influence? And if, as may happen, India and
Britain finally settle down into a decent and friendly relationship, will this be
partly because Gandhi, by keeping up his struggle obstinately and without
hatred, disinfected the political air? That one even thinks of asking such
questions indicates his stature. One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic
distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf
(he never made any such claim himself, by the way), one may also reject
sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi's basic aims were anti-
human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared
with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has
managed to leave behind!
1949
T H E E N D
