His Discoveries

But when we look into the splendid mosaic of his thoughts and deeds there is one thing which stands out as unique and puts him in the forefront of the evolution of man in our time. This was the unique discovery he made in a unique laboratory. The laboratory was South Africa and the discovery was satyagraha. It was history which threw Gandhi into the South African laboratory. The situation in South Africa was itself unprecedented in history. It was not merely that a white minority Government brutalized itself and millions of coloured people in an attempt to permanently enslave them. Slavery was nothing new in the world, but this one was unique in that it was grounded in a new metaphysics and ethics buttressed by modern science. Every thought and action conceivable to diabolic human ingenuity was drawn upon to perpetuate the subjection of the many who were weak to the few who were strong. Any rebellion was totally made impossible. The very thought of rebellion was made treason. The White minority Government was armed not only with weapons but with perverted laws, institutions and philosophy. This slavery itself was held up as part of God’s plan for man and the teachings of the New Testament were blackened and poisoned in support of it. The Bible had taught through twenty centuries that God made man in His image, but the White tyrants in South Africa taught that this applied only to the White man and never to the coloured man. The many who were weak and held in subjection had no arms, no organisation, no education, no power of any kind. They could work and manage to live only within the unbreakable boundaries of their slavery. Once they accepted their slavery, they were fed, clothed and given shelter, but without any human rights whatsoever, not even for a husband to live with his wife, nor a mother with her children. They could live like cattle in the cattlesheds of this fantastic civilization. Any attempt to break away was met with torture and death. It was a terrible prison house within the heart of modern civilization. History cast Gandhi into such a prison house. He had lived and studied in London. He was a Barrister-at-law. He was an Indian with a great and ancient tradition of culture in his blood. He was, however, young and inexperienced. He could have turned tail and run away from this terror. It was at this point that Gandhi revealed the first glimmer of his greatness. He stood firm and looked at the terror with unflinching eyes. Can we not say, in humility today, that God broke into history at this point and gave Gandhi the inner urge to stand firm? He had behind him only unlettered, poor and weak Indian coolies and he himself was dubbed a coolie barrister by the arrogant Whites who kept the keys of the prison. The historic challenge before Gandhi was whether the weak could fight the strong with any hope of redemption. Throughout history in all the battles between the strong and the weak the weak had always surrendered or perished. Gandhi asked himself the question if the inescapable fact of history, as it appeared to be, could ever represent the law of truth, justice and love, i.e. the law of God. Again, God broke into the soul of Gandhi and Gandhi knew at once that what surrounded him was really the negation of the law of history and the law of God. That settled, he plunged into the experiment to discover a weapon with which the weak could fight the strong.

The Essence Of Gandhi

By G. Ramachandran

(In this article the author gives us an insight about how Gandhi arrived at the technique of Satyagraha. Being a many-sided personality his experiences in South Africa became his laboratory where he conducted experiments for the betterment of down trodden, subjugated human beings. Through his constant experimentation he realized that nonviolence was the strongest weapon of the subjugated masses and taught them to use it. He was able to induce courage and strength in the weakest of the weak and remorse in the hearts of the cruelest of the cruel. Such were his discipline and aspirations and his belief that good exists in all humans, one only has to awaken that good within).

Gandhi

Gandhi was a many-sided personality. The outward simplicity of his life and his single-minded devotion to nonviolence cloaked innumerable deep currents of ideas, disciplines, loyalties and aspirations. He was at once saint and revolutionary, politician and social reformer, economist and man of religion, educationist and satyagrahi; devotee alike of faith and reason, Hindu and inter-religious, nationalist and internationalist, man of action and dreamer of dreams. He was a very great reconciler of opposites and he was that without strain or artificiality. He loved greatly and accepted unreservedly that truth can reside in opposites. No one has yet attempted a complete analysis of his complex and magnificent personality. We have all come too much under the spell of the astonishing integration and unity of the man within himself. It was Rabindranath Tagore who once wrote that those disciplines are the most complex which finally lead to the utter simplicity of a great song. One has only to look at those who learn music to see the daily grind of hard discipline through which they must pass before they bring out a soulful song. Gandhi's life was one long and ceaseless saga of endeavour in which he added, bit by bit and piece by piece, to his stature culminating in the advancing fullness of his personality. There was nothing mystic or miraculous about his development and growth, from a common man into the unsurpassed mahatma of our history. It is open to each one of us to see how he advanced, step by step, gathering innumerable fragments of truth one by one and piecing them together in the crucible of his life, ready to look at facts, understand their significance, face any consequence in the pursuit of a cause, suffer any penalty for a mistake, recover lost ground again, but always advancing, open-minded and without fear and dedicated selflessly to reach and hold the truth of a matter at any cost. He was, therefore, not born a mahatma. He grew into one. He was a common man who pulled himself up to most uncommon heights. He was no god, but became a god-man. Gandhi knew this about himself and that was why he called his biography, “The Story of My Experiments With Truth”. Experimentation was one of the deepest passions of his life. He experimented with food, health and cure, clothes and dress, politics and economics, education and reform, organisation and revolution, ethics and spirituality, with almost everything that his life knew as part of life. With relentless logic and courage he broke new ground in every direction and yet had the depth and width of mind to separate defeat from success, the false from the true, the unreal from the real and to integrate all his aims and achievements into the unity of his personality.