Gandhi: In his own words

Gandhi has become a symbol and a myth. Yet none has taken the measure of the 20th Century's most enigmatic and remarkable personality. Interpreters continue to see him as a spiritual paragon, a wily politician, the inventor of civil disobedience or as a critic of modernity. A clue to understanding Gandhi is to be found in his writings. His text is the work of a man who saw himself neither as simply a political leader nor as a uniquely spiritual teacher. It represents an effort to redefine each of these categories and ways of living, says SUNIL KHILNANI in his Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography The Story of My Experiments With Truth. We carry exclusive extracts on the occasion of the Mahatma's birth anniversary on October 2.

Introduction: An Experimental Life

GANDHI'S presence in the 20th Century, a century that perfected the arts of extermination, is weirdly arresting. His life seems peculiarly unhoused in the violent landscape of his times. How, by what twist of historical fate, did this frail, ungainly man with teapot ears, whose figure wrapped in handspun cloth evoked a faded, archetypal memory of saintliness, wander into the modern world; and how, for a time, did he electrify it? What was he doing there, and what can the trace of his presence mean to us today?

More than 50 years after his assassination in 1948, Gandhi has become a symbol, a myth, even a commodity. Yet we are still far from taking the measure of the 20th Century's most enigmatic and remarkable personality. Confronted by the vast corpus of his writings and speeches (the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi make-up a hundred volume monument), interpreters continue to quarrel, seeing him variously as a spiritual paragon, a wily politician, a psychological and anthropological curiosity, an inventor of political techniques of non-violence and civil disobedience, or as a critic of modernity.

But perhaps a safer clue to understanding Gandhi is to be found in his famous plea: "My writings should be cremated with my body. What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written". Gandhi was an artful choreographer of his doings - he seemed to know from an early age that he wanted to organise the haphazard trivia of his daily actions into formal order, to give them a shape and meaning. George Orwell, otherwise temperamentally distant from Gandhi, saw exactly the tensed, pageant-like character of Gandhi's life, its status as a theatrical parable, when he observed of Gandhi that "his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant". What gave every act its significance was its place in a larger story. Indeed, the most subversive skill of this famously unarmed rebel was his ability to tell stories - stories that came entirely to redefine how people perceived themselves, and what they believed they could and could not do.

Nowhere did Gandhi deploy this skill to more powerful effect than when it came to his own life: it enabled him not merely to turn his life into a story, but to live it as a story. That skill is clearly manifest in Gandhi's An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth: a magnificent, puzzling, strenuous act of self-creation, which describes - as it enacts - the metamorphosis of a fearful, unsuccessful provincial lawyer into a leader who dominated India's politics for almost four decades and who took on and successfully defeated the British imperial state.

What drove this transformation was Gandhi's capacity for self- creation, or, as he termed it, his fascination with "experiments" in living. He developed and refined this taste for experiment across the three distinct arenas in which he lived his life - England (where he disembarked at Southampton on a grey September day in 1888, a naive and aspirant 19-year-old got-up in what he believed were fashionable white flannels); South Africa, his home between 1893 and 1914, where he discovered his capacities to organise and protest, as well as his ability to invent for himself both a personality and a community; and of course India itself, where he returned in 1915 to become the moral dynamo and canny political brain of the vast Congress movement that took India to independence and (to his despair) Partition, in 1947.

If An Autobiography exemplifies Gandhi's extraordinary talent for self-creation, it is also a testimony to the contradictions and insecurities, the isolation and inwardly-directed violence of this very public man. Gandhi achieved in it a language and expression of such directness and clarity that the reader who comes to it for the first time may find themselves gliding over it all-too easily. Its simplicity can play tricks: it is a work of studied thought and artifice, and it is useful to recall something of the historical and cultural moment of its creation.

We know how to read political autobiographies - to check, suspiciously, self-projection against fact, subjective perception against objective structure - and we are perhaps familiar too with reading the testaments of religious leaders and saints. Gandhi's text, though, is different. It is the work of man who saw himself neither as simply a political leader nor as uniquely a spiritual teacher, and it represents an effort to redefine each of these categories and ways of living. Both in the narrative voice it achieves, and in the distinctive interference it generates between the pursuit of a personal ethics and the claims of a public, political life, An Autobiography is a challenge to our settled views. The idea of religion it expresses, and its conception of politics and public action, are profoundly original.

Gandhi had first contemplated writing an autobiography in 1921, but he did not actually begin work on it until 1925, at the age of 56. It initially took the form of a series of articles, the first of which Gandhi published in December 1925 in his own newspaper, Navajivan (Young India). Published under the title "The Story of My Experiments with Truth", the articles continued to appear until early 1929; collected together in book form, they were published in two volumes, the first appearing in 1927, the second in 1929, and carried the additional title, An Autobiography.

In his "Introduction", Gandhi describes in diffident terms how he came to write it, acceding finally to the urgings of his colleagues, and finding his parsimonious instincts satisfied by the fact that he could use these chapters to fill column inches in his newspaper. That he could turn to this task in the mid- 1920s was in large part due to the Indian political situation. These were slack years in the Congress's political campaign, when the movement seemed to be losing its way. Gandhi decided to remove himself from the main lines of Indian politics, shunting himself to the siding of his ashram at Sabarmati. This retreat followed what had been a period of remarkable personal success for Gandhi. He had arrived in India from South Africa with a reputation for integrity and hard work, but he was in fact virtually unknown beyond a narrow, elite circle. Yet, without any power base of his own, he had - through deft timing and manoeuvre - seized control of the Indian National Congress, gave it a new Constitution and structure, and had managed to successfully draw together antagonistic groups, particularly Muslims and Hindus. By the mid-1920s, though, this was unravelling. His own physical health had also weakened, his body ravaged by his early experiments with fasting and dietary regimes (he had first used a fast for public ends in 1924) and by his imprisonment at Yeravda Jail between 1922 and 1924. At Sabarmati, he studied, and he wrote: he kept up his side of a vast personal correspondence, wrote hundreds of articles for his newspaper, completed his great history of his South African years, satyagraha in South Africa (which he always considered the crucial twin to his more personal autobiography), and began "The Story of My Experiments with Truth".

In his mid-50s, Gandhi had embarked on a period of reflection, which he hoped would give him new bearings. He wished to formulate his ideas, his ethics and his politics - hitherto worked out in the heat of the moment as responses to specific events and campaigns - into a more universal form, and to revise the inner content as well as the outer image of his own self. Even so, the narrative unfolded in a somewhat erratic way, as Gandhi described to his American publisher, the Christian priest John Haynes Holmes: "I have to write from day to day. I have mapped out no fixed plan. I write every week as the past events develop in my mind on the day allotted for writing the weekly chapter" ("Gandhi to Holmes, 8/5/27", Collected Works Vol. 33, p. 299). He allowed the chapters to be freely reprinted in other Indian newspapers, but he decided to reserve the copyright to publish them in book form - the first occasion on which he had reserved copyright in anything he had written (unsurprisingly, it was his American publisher, worried about how many copies he might sell, who advised him to do so). As they appeared week by week, the chapters generated enormous debate among his readers, and prompted hundreds of letters, many of them questioning his decision to put on display the details of his personal life.

Gandhi's decision to present his personal "experiments" in this way perturbed all conventions of Indian autobiographical writing - which invariably focused on the public exploits of the authorial hero. To appreciate the significance of this decision, a more specific sense of Gandhi's historical circumstances is helpful: one that lies somewhere between seeing him, narrowly, as the spokesman of Indian nationalist politics, and a more stratospheric view of him as a universal spiritual pilgrim. Gandhi's life encompassed one of the great transformations in Indian history - the arrival of modernity, impelled by colonialism, with its host of pressing intellectual and practical questions. For Gandhi, as for his fellow intellectuals - Aurobindo, Tagore, Nehru, before them, Vivekananda - an insistent challenge was that of how to translate this alien world into one which was comprehensible, a world where it was possible to find one's moral bearings, and over which Indians, collectively and individually, might gain some control and even mastery.

Gandhi chose to address such questions through the practicalities of his life - his bodily comportment - as well as through constant commentary on his life and practice. His Autobiography stated, in a way that was to become massively influential for Indians, a new possibility. It made clear to his compatriots that they ought not to limit themselves to a simple, monolithic choice - between on the one hand, accepting the world inherited from their predecessors, one of traditional religion and caste practice, or, on the other hand, embracing the modern world, dressing, speaking, eating and thinking like Englishmen. Neither inheritance nor emulation were necessary; rather, the task for Indians was to chose their selves, to construct a life of their own.

The method Gandhi devised in order to fashion such a life and self was that of "experiment". Experiment is the operative mode of An Autobiography, the narrative cause and impulse. In his quest for an ethical life, we find Gandhi conducting experiments in dancing and in householding, in education, washing and laundry, in healing and medicine, in hygiene, politics, and dietetics, in fasting, and in earth and water treatment, in friendship, in communal living, and of course in truth. "I wore out my body experimenting," Gandhi confessed of his strenuous devotion to the task, and still he kept at it, insisting that "any number of experiments is too small".

Through experiment, Gandhi came to confront and finally face down his "fear and trembling" - a condition that runs like a leitmotif through the entire text. In so much of the Autobiography, Gandhi's sense of physical fear is palpable: at the prospect of speaking - at school, on board ship, before the courts of law, even when, already a political personage, he was called to address the Congress. We feel too his fear at nightfall and darkness; when he has to mix with the Indian elite; when trying to make his career as lawyer; and perhaps most painfully, in the trivial everyday routines of life. Buying a train ticket, travelling, puzzling over how to dress himself, even when walking down a street - all are liable to induce terror in Gandhi. Gandhi's narrative voice sometimes seems to affect a jaunty, almost Pollyanna-ish tone. Yet this is deceptive. For Gandhi's experience is that of a man cast into a world in which he has to wage a constant battle to steady himself: a world where both the traditional, with its superstitions and rituals, and the modern, with its choices framed by colonial power, appear intimidating.

Gandhi mastered his fears through a discovery. By blurring the lines and shifting the barriers between the public and private realms - the core distinction of liberal theory and practice, and of the modern state and its law - he could generate unprecedented powers, and so undermine his opponents. As he saw it, modern politics - which, in his vivid image, encircled everything like the coil of snake - had constricted and separated the domains of private ethics and public action. The means to reunite the two, as well as to draw the poison of modern politics, was to turn his own life inside out. The details of his life were thus constantly witnessed and recorded - befitting, perhaps, for a barrister whose language, manners and theatrical sense of confrontation were all shaped by his encounter with British law. Gandhi extended an open invitation to fellow Indians (both elite and poor), to the British, and to the world at large, to eavesdrop on him at any and every moment. Paradoxically - and in a supreme subversion of the principle of the Benthamite panopticon - by exposing himself to constant public surveillance, he was able to shake free of both the stifling superstitions of his own society as well as the oppressive conformities of the modern world, and to move into an arena of freedom that lay beyond the reach of the imperial state and the grip of tradition. His every action, however intimate, was thus infused with a political charge. His dietary "crankisms" (as he called them), his sexual anxieties and habits, his bowel rhythms, fevers and black moods, his prayers, spinning and walks, the drinking of a glass of orange juice to break a fast, gathering up a handful of dusty salt, even his silences themselves became sources of rumour, legend and inspiration. In such ways, he made of his physical frame a barometer's needle: by its swings, all could judge for themselves the British Empire's moral health. And the British imperial state, faced with this artful politics of the mundane, found the wind taken from its sails.

To write an autobiography, Gandhi confessed to his readers, was to indulge in something of an unnatural practice, one that was "peculiar to the West". Yet his use of the form marks a landmark in non-Western, and specifically Indian, literary invention. He used it to create, in the Indian imagination, the domains of public and private: he reminds his readers that for a "history" of his public work and life, they should turn to satyagraha in South Africa; here, in the autobiography, they will find only the details of his personal and private life. Yet no sooner were these spheres demarcated than Gandhi was busily blurring and commingling them. His use of the genre of autobiography was itself an instance of his ability to seize upon categories from the Western repertoire, and to translate them and bend them to his own purposes, so allowing him to live and recount his own, non-Western - and distinctively modern - Indian life.

The modernity of the life he created lay most fundamentally in the sense that it was a chosen life (even if often stumblingly so) and also one whose past meaning was revisable in the light of future choices. It was in no sense foreclosed or pre-destined - as, traditionally, a Hindu might have conceived his or her life. Nor was it directed by spiritual masters or gurus. Gandhi speaks of his disappointments in his search for a guide, and dwells on the influence upon him of the Jain teacher, Raychandbhai, only to acknowledge that even in his late 50s, "the throne remains vacant" in his spiritual heart. Equally, he did not see his life as simply formed - and deformed - by the pressures and seductions of the modern world. By conducting his life as an experiment, he saw himself as akin to a scientist controlling a laboratory session, who "never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them".

The sense of choice expresses itself across the defining areas of Gandhi's life: family, community, religion, God, the pursuit of truth. He refused to accept the conventional images or content ascribed to any of these, and strove instead to create his own sense of each. Thus, he transplanted his family into unfamiliar situations, became a teacher to his wife, and worried over their clothes, their food, and over how their children should be brought up (in these tasks, he turned often to one of his favourite resources: self-help manuals). He cut his links with the community into which he was born (he was actually expelled from his caste group for having polluted himself by travelling overseas), and found ways to create for himself communities of choice, drawn from all religions. These communities included his fellow workers in South Africa, the motley individuals he assembled in the ashrams that he established, and most importantly, the Congress movement - which he hoped could stand for his vision of an Indian nation undivided by religion or caste.

In the sphere of religion and God, Gandhi writes of how, by opening himself up to the competing claims of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam, he experienced a "mental churning", which led him to a spiritual crisis. "I do not know where I am, and what is and what should be my belief," he recalls telling one religious interlocutor. His search led him in and out of spiritual "Seeker's Clubs", and finally towards a desire for a direct and personal relation to God, unmediated by tradition or priests, and not bound by the dogma of any one religious faith. He had to face directly, in his spiritual commitments as in his daily practice, the question of choice. His vegetarianism, for instance, was the product of an active and reasoned choice and one made, as he insisted, "independently of religious texts". So too, in his religious philosophy, the necessity of choice led him to create a unique religious blend, that drew upon legends and stories from India's popular religious traditions, and wove these together with strands of Christian teaching. "Saints and seers," he wrote, "have left their experiences for us, but they have given us no infallible and universal prescription. For perfection or freedom from error comes only from grace". That sense of grace, of a personal and potentially wrathful God, was clearly borrowed from Gandhi's reading of Christian writings. The presence of such borrowings underlines how misleading it can be to think of Gandhi as a purely Hindu spiritual thinker: his religious views were far more complex and elusive. Significantly, he described the object of his faith loosely, and by negation: "I have made the world's faith in God my own, and as my faith is ineffaceable, I regard that faith as amounting to experience ... I have no word for characterising my belief in God".

One could read such a statement as an instance of a characteristic Gandhian strategy. He affected plainness and clarity, while also cultivating a deliberate ambiguity in his terminology, so allowing others to read into his words their own hopes and fears - a crucial ploy for one who had to address and appeal to so many diverse audiences: India's peasants and educated elites, British politicians and people, and world public opinion. But to see his allusive gesture at his sense of divinity merely as an example of cunningly elastic rhetoric is to miss how Gandhi, both in his own life and in the kind of universal ethics he wished to create, held fast to an idea of psychological and ethical metamorphosis. Human personality was, for him, not pre- given and static. It was not decisively shaped either by nature or culture: instinctual fear or social prejudice, each was conquerable. Because human personality was susceptible to influence and infinitely revisable, so too definitions - of values and ideals - had to keep an open-ended character: meanings were not stipulative, but needed to be worked out in the crucible of practice.

In his own life, and in his recounting of it, he bore witness to this. The persona adopted in the Autobiography is not that of a saintly, prophetic individual preaching his message; rather, it is that of a kind of Everyman (one Gandhi's favourite books was Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress), stumbling painfully out from darkness and error towards the light of truth. Gandhi charts out an artisanal picture of the moral self - one that enables the crafting of an ethics at once personal and universal, in the midst of a bewildering world.

That ethics was far removed from any Hindu view of a spiritual life as one that required renunciation of the world. Gandhi, at the close of his Autobiography, explained the relationship between his spiritual quest, his pursuit of truth by means of Ahimsa or non-violence, and his involvement in public life:

"To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest of creation as oneself. And a man who aspires after that cannot afford to keep out of any field of life. That is why my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means."

It is an important formulation, and one which makes no sense if read either solely in terms of the grammar of traditional Hinduism, or the lexicon of modern politics. By putting it this way, Gandhi steers our attention to the profound unconventionality of his ethical sense: its existence as a product of radical, original, and deeply personal choice. The necessity of choice, and the discovery - by the means of experience and constant experiment - of the capacity of judgment that allows right choices to be made: that is the core drama of Gandhi's Autobiography. As such, it is a very modern drama; and Gandhi's was a very modern life - perhaps most of all in its judgement that there was more to life than just being modern.

Gandhi wrote the chapters in Gujarati. The translation was the mainly the work of Gandhi's then personal secretary, Mahadev Desai, who translated the first 28 chapters before political duties called him away; the remaining 14 chapters were translated by Pyarelal Nayar. The English version was read and corrected by Miraben (Madelaine Slade). The current translation was revised in 1940 by Mahadev Desai, with the assistance of the British anthropologist, Verrier Elwin, who insisted on anonymity - on this point, see Ramachandra Guha, Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, his Tribals, and India (Chicago, 1999), p.143-44.

Sunil Khilnani, the author of The Idea of India, teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London.

An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, M.K. Gandhi, Penguin Classics, Introduction by Sunil Khilnani

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