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ON THE LEFT is the 70- year-old Mahatma Gandhi who - with the help of three small books - was able to foreswear violence, materialism, and the distractions of sex.
He held all India, and the world, in thrall.
ON THE RIGHT is the young Mohandas Gandhi who, in his first flush of manhood, sought to be a barrister and a dandy, but failed to impress London or the people of Pretoria.
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Three secular books that changed
the lives of 300 million people.
Three hundred million? The figure could be twice, even three times that. It is impossible to estimate, or underestimate, the numbers of people or the amount of change effected by one man - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who prepared himself by reading some amateur philosophy by contemporary Westerners.
Some claim that Gandhi set one billion people free - nearly a quarter of the human population of the planet.
Whatever the statistics and whatever his influence might have been in bringing independence to India, it surely can be justifiably claimed that he did more than change – he saved the lives of – several million people who might have been massacred in the religious riots in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan.
But before Gandhi could significantly change any lives he had to change his own. Apart from his experience and observation of racism in South Africa, the change in the life of the little man was wrought by three little books, according so some of his biographers.*
The books were:
John Ruskin’s Unto This Last
Henry Thoreau’s essay On Civil Disobedience
Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You
The very titles unconsciously mirror Gandhi’s later philosophy and policy of Satyagraha – struggle without violence.
In the first of these Ruskin asserted the view, among others, that riches were just a tool to secure power over men. A labourer was as good as a lawyer; a life tilling the soil was as good as the life and career of an industrial giant.
In the second, Thoreau propounded the idea that an individual had the right to ignore unjust laws, and refuse allegiance to a tyrannical government.
In the third book which Gandhi read, Tolstoy wrote of the need to apply moral principles strictly, even to daily life. Gandhi finally met Tolstoy and found they had remarkably similar views on issues ranging from non-violence and education to industrialisation and diet.
The three books provided the Mahatma with the motive - and mobilised his astonishing willpower to surrender all human basic instincts in order to focus on the purpose of life.
He immersed himself in Brahmacharya – a lifelong pledge to sexual continence. He was plagued all his days and nights with its temptations, and possibly failed at times, but he was palpably able to stay focused and to overcome not only sexual lust, but also hunger for food, desire for possessions, and craving for comfort and clothes.
[Of course the power perceived in these books depend on the reader, not on the views in books. I confess having read as a young man Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and was left only with an impression (unlike reading Thoreau at the time) of the writer’s Victorian pomposity. Read or re-read Ruskin to judge for yourself].
Undoubtedly the Mahatma was moulded by his earliest religious teachings and by his own moral courage and character. Reading helped him formulate his plans and his actions.
Despite his impatience with people and his self-perceived faults, Mahatma Gandhi is surely one of the world’s most remarkable figures – up there with all the saints and prophets and semi-gods and gurus admired or worshipped across the world through the ages.
*Freedom at Midnight, by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins |
