While a lot has been said and written about Gandhi being a product of his time, the impact that his reading had on shaping his mind has largely gone unnoticed. In fact, not many even know that Gandhi was an avid reader, with a personal library comprising thousands of books.
In , after the British confiscated the properties of the satyagrahis who had participated in the salt satyagraha under the leadership of Gandhi, he, in sympathy with the satyagrahis, disbanded the Sabarmati Ashram and donated his collection of books to the municipal library of Ahmedabad — in an interview given on July 27, , Gandhi mentions a collection of nearly 11, books. The Bibliography of Books Read by Mahatma Gandhi compiled by Kiriti Bhavsar, Mark Lindly and Purnima Upadhyay lists only 4, books, but it still gives us an insight into the mind of the intellectual who once collected, and for all practical purposes owned, this magnificent collection.
I have described Gandhi, the one-time de facto owner of this large library, as an intellectual. The term atopos unclassifiable , often used to describe Socrates, is equally applicable to Gandhi. Gandhi started his professional life as a full-fledged Eurocentric Hindu male. The single fatal moral failing of Gandhi occurred in South Africa during this phase. For a purely opportunistic reason, that is to get political favours for the British Indians living in South Africa, Gandhi formed an ambulance corps comprising British Indians and joined the British army in its war against the Zulus.
The Zulus had risen in revolt against their alien white oppressors who had imposed a tax on them for living in their own ancestral land. Critics of the South African Gandhi, who suffer from an inability to distinguish political justice from social justice, fail to appreciate that in South Africa, Gandhi was fighting only for political justice for the British Indians who faced a real threat of losing that status if they were identified with the native Africans.
Gandhi fought for the cause of the British Indians and achieved a great degree of success and legitimate fame before he returned to India. This, I maintain, was due to his reflective use of the enormous number of books he read. His autobiography My Experiments with Truth itself bears testimony to this fact.
Here Gandhi the voracious reader is constantly evolving as he incessantly questions himself until he invents a redemptive path for himself, however temporary it might be.
Reading for Gandhi was a sadhana. He shunned both reading for pleasure and for mere information. His experiments with truth were experiments to get rid of selfishness completely, in the way, he thought, the Buddha and Socrates had once managed to achieve. He named this most coveted achievement as moksha. Nevertheless, till he met his assassin, this incredibly honest man mourned his failure to achieve moksha.
Constant reading, reflecting and writing, as well as political activism, helped Gandhi pose new questions to himself — engaging in self-transforming questioning was his idea of philosophy. This process, in turn, aided him in his unfinished journey from selfishness to moksha.
While Gandhi declared himself to be a sanatani Hindu, his writings show him to be far removed from religiosity of an everyday nature. He did not believe in idol worship or rituals of any kind even Vedic rites. The man from Manchester comes across as both a Samaritan and a spiritual entrepreneur: a man from an industrial city in an industrial age, for whom Christianity is not just a faith but an enthusiasm.
Gandhi repeatedly points out that he knows little, and yet he always seems to know enough to be a comparativist: lines from the Sermon on the Mount remind him of the Gita which he first read in English in England and a song by a Gujarati poet.
There are few readymade contexts in An Autobiography , few confirmations of what a life and the making of an Indian political leader should look like. Many of the moments described in it — his attempt to become a meat-eater; his admiration for the Gita and the Sermon on the Mount; other fitful developments — have long been canonical, like episodes in the life of a saint. What kind of ethos? This word, more than any other, describes the world of Indians from the beginnings of the colonial project to well after it ended, and it implies why that period in India is most significant or memorable not because of the achievements and depredations of that project, or even the triumph of the freedom movement, but for these experiments Indians undertook.
The encounter is accompanied by an acknowledgment of the nature and implications of its impact. Tagore, temperamentally different from Gandhi and often in disagreement with him, is also shaped by this experimental ethos, this openness to the encounter.
Nor are they related to a passive imbibing of a colonial education Tagore hated school; Gandhi was no lover of the classroom or hard-headed nativist revisionism, which depends on already knowing what you must value in your heritage. What links all three — Gandhi and the Bible and the Gita ; Tagore, the Vaishnav poets, Chatterton, and Kalidasa; Debendranath and the Upanishads — is an alertness to chance.
An important part of this experiment had to do with what they wore. Something equally defamiliarizing, rather than expectedly unconventional, was happening earlier with clothing. Gandhi recognized this temper in his encounter with the Gujarati writer Narayan Hemchandra when he was studying law in London.
His dress was queer — a clumsy pair of trousers, a wrinkled, dirty, brown coat after the Parsi fashion, no necktie or collar, and a tasselled woollen cap. I am not a fashionable fellow like you.
The minimum amount of food and the minimum amount of clothing suffice for me. So we both called on the Cardinal. I put on the usual visiting suit. Narayan Hemchandra was the same as ever, in the same coat and the same trousers. I tried to make fun of this but he laughed me out and said:.
They think of his heart. But for three generations, from my grandfather, they have been Prime Ministers in several Kathiawad States.
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