'Religious inputs in Gandhi's political concepts'

By Mohammed Iqbal

JAIPUR, APRIL 7. An American Gandhian scholar claims to have found new evidence to link religion with Mahatma Gandhi's political movements and Satyagraha. Religion, he says, had provided significant inputs to Mahatma Gandhi's own concept of politics. Mahatma Gandhi's religious feelings grew more intense with his struggle against the British rulers over the years.

Dr. Mark Lindley, a Gandhian scholar based in Boston, U.S., and a Visiting Professor at the University of Kerala's Centre for Gandhian Studies, said Mahatma Gandhi had selected for the Salt March and other campaigns, where he needed a small number of disciplined Satyagrahis, only those who believed in a divine power sustaining their effort.

Mahatma Gandhi had himself said: ``Had I not placed my worries at the feet of God, I would have gone mad by this time.'' He said it already in 1924, so one could imagine how he must have felt by 1948 when he died,'' Dr. Lindley pointed out during an exclusive interview to The Hindu here.

Dr. Lindley, who has lectured on Gandhi and related topics at universities and study centres all over the world, is the author of about 80 publications including ``Gandhi and the world today'' and ``Gandhi and humanism''. He was here to deliver a lecture on ``A critical appraisal of Gandhi's economist, J.C. Kumarappa'' at the Rajasthan University's Social Sciences Research Centre.

Dr. Lindley said Mahatma Gandhi's first journal, Indian Opinion - launched in South Africa - was initially non-religious in tone, but it later reflected the religiosity gaining ground in Gandhi's way of thinking. This was in the mid 1890s, when he had recently given serious consideration to the possibility of converting to Christianity but decided instead to keep his Hindu identity.

The Gandhian scholar pointed out that the Satyagraha was invented in 1906 when a Muslim colleague of Mahatma Gandhi swore ``before Allah'' to disobey a certain unjust law. Dr. Lindley has undertaken an analytical study of various incidents in Gandhi's life for writing a book on ``Gandhi and religion''.

He said his underlying purpose in writing the book was to convey in some detail to westerners, who admire Gandhi but at the same time consider Christianity the best religion, his lesson that all the religions are worthy of genuine respect and one should take points of value from all of them. Interestingly, Dr. Lindley is himself an atheist.

``My Christian reader may come to understand more about some of those religions - the ones Gandhi knew - in a respectful way, and to see contemporary Christianity from a fresh perspective,'' Dr. Lindley said. There can be no better way to mitigate the ``civilisational conflict'' than to understand the ethical values permeating other people's traditional civilisation.

Referring to the prayer meetings organised regularly in Mahatma Gandhi's Ashram, Dr. Lindley said the people attending them expressed regard for other religions by singing, in praise of Lord Ram, ``Thy names are Ishwar and Allah,'' and including a Christian hymn such as ``Lead Kindly Light''.

``When someone put to him the question why most of the hymns sung in his prayer meetings were from the Hindu religion, Gandhi replied that the only reason for this was that most of the people attending were Hindus,'' he said. The prayer meetings included mainly hymns of praise and never any prayer asking for anything. For instance, the basic Christian ``Lord's Prayer,'' with its petition: ``Give us this day our daily bread,'' was not recited.

Asked why Mahatma Gandhi could not prevent Partition despite fighting relentlessly against communalism, Dr. Lindley said Gandhi made a big mistake in 1937 when he brushed aside Mohammed Ali Jinnah's request to meet, after the provincial elections in which the Congress had been more successful than the Muslim League, to discuss how they might cooperate in future.

``Gandhi ought to have embraced Jinnah at that moment just as warmly as he adopted, a year later, his leading leftist opponent in the Congress, Subhash Chandra Bose,'' he said, and pointed that Subhash Chandra Bose had always thereafter retained his regard for Mahatma Gandhi.

He said Partition was brought about because too many Muslims were afraid that with the Congress governing India, they would become second-class citizens. ``This in fact did happen in regard to language, as Hindi was to some extent Sanskritised and thereby made more unlike Urdu than it had been in Gandhi's days,'' he said and added that Mahatma Gandhi would have fought against such tendencies.

Dr. Lindley, who lived as a child in a house which was less than 100 metres from the Indian Embassy in Washington, was interested in India and Mahatma Gandhi since childhood. His father was an editor of Newsweek and visited India for the Independence celebrations in 1947. ``My school had cancelled classes when Gandhi was assassinated and an assembly was held to mourn his death,'' he said.

Citing an amusing example from the life of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Lindley said Gandhi has written in his autobiography that as a child he had objected to Christianity making people drink alcohol. Soon after this was published, an old man wrote to him a letter saying he was the only missionary in Rajkot during Gandhi's childhood and had never encouraged his converts to drink alcohol.

``But in fact he had, because in those days pasteurised grape- juice had not been invented; and the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion entailed taking a sip of wine. The man could not see this plain fact about himself,'' Dr. Lindley said.

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