Gandhi and His Ashrams Written by: Mark Thomson First Edition : 1993 Published by: Popolar Prakashan Pvt. Ltd. 35-C, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya Marg, Popular Press Bldg., Tardeo, Mumbai 400 034 India Gandhi and His Ashrams ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book derives from my Doctoral thesis, researched and written in India during the years 1978-82. The opportunity to live and study in India was made possible by a scholarship under the Commonwealth Scholarship and Felloweship Plan (CSFP). I would like to thank the Government of India and Australia for this support. The decision to leave my country for over four years in order to complete this work was made easier by the encouragement and support of my friend and teacher, Dr. Jim Masselos of the University of Sydney. His advice and assistance has been invaluable in producing this book. I would like to thank all the Indian Institutions and their staff that helped in obtaining research material. My host institution, the University of Bombay, and the Maharashtra State Archives were of assistance in this regard. A number of Gandhian institutions were also a great help along the way. These included Mani Bhavan in Bombay, Sabarmati Ashram and Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad, Sevagram Ashram in Maharashtra and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi in Delhi. As I resided for short periods at the two ashrams and the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, I would particularly like to thank these communities for their hospitality. Several people have assisted in preparing and proofing the various drafts of the book and I thank them all. Above all, it would have been a much more unruly document without my father’s proof reading and advice on the text. Lastly, I would like to thank family and friends in India, Mauritius and Australia for their support and encouragement. I cannot do justice in words to the debt of gratitude I owe my wife, Carolie. This book is dedicated to here. www.mkgandhi.org Page 2 Gandhi and His Ashrams INTRODUCTION Since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's death in 1948 his life and thought have continued to be the subject-matter of extensive study. The rich and diverse legacy he left behind has provided a seemingly inexhaustible source for research scholars. From the publication of the first biography of Gandhi in 19091 to the present day, his way of life and philosophy have been chronicled and analysed more extensively than any other twentieth century figure. By the time of his return to India from South Africa in 1915 he was already known around the world as an ascetic revolutionary. The main body of writings about Gandhi are in the form of complete biographies, brief biographical essays, personal memoirs, and articles and treatises on his moral, political, economic, social and educational thought, which he designated his philosophy of satyagraha or truth-force. As Gandhi became a figure of world renown, men and women who lived and worked closely with him in South Africa and India were motivated to write biographical accounts and personal recollections of their friend, colleague and mentor. However, apart from an exceptional few, the many early biographies suffer from unevenness and lack of focus, and are often more identifiable with panegyric than historical writing. The best biographies have been written since his death, including the comprehensive study of the early and later stages of his life by Pyarelal,2 Gandhi's secretary of many years, and books by Fischer, Nanda, Ashe, Payne, together with the small but excellent study by Woodcock.3 In the preface to his penetrating biography Ashe highlights the need to define the paradoxical figure ofGandhi and demystify his ideas. This process hasgone on unabated with detailed and scholarly studies of every aspect of his life andthought; looking at Gandhi the social, religious, economic and political theorist; evaluating Gandhi the statesman, educationist, revolutionary, socialist, prophet and saint. Despite this wide-ranging body of literature Gandhi's social experimentation in the ashrams or communities he established with his followers has been www.mkgandhi.org Page 3 Gandhi and His Ashrams neglected. His pervading image in India and elsewhere remains that of charismatic leader and political revolutionary. This book is a contribution to the ongoing quest to rediscover the non-violent alternative. It tests the strength of Gandhi's claim that the ashrams were his finest achievements, and that the successes and failures of these communities were merely reflections of his own strengths and weaknesses. It is an attempt to understand the dynamics of his nonviolent philosophy of action, firstly, as the foundation of his "experiments with truth" in the ashrams he shared with his followers, and, secondly, as the guiding principle underpinning his revolutionary programmes to realise a new individual and a new society. In common with other treatises on the satyagraha philosophy this book adopts a biographical approach as a backdrop to the study of Gandhi's communitarian ideas and experimentation. His thought was inextricably bound up with his actions, and to study his theories in isolation from their practical dynamics is to deny the truth of Gandhi's claim that "my life is my message". The major sources were the correspondence and journalistic writings of Gandhi and his many colleagues and disciples who contributed in some way to the establishment and development of the Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa and the Satyagraha Ashram and Sevagram Ashram in India. Whenever possible the material was supplemented by personal accounts of ashram life, interviews and questionnaire answers from people who at some stage had been intimately acquainted with ashram life. In addition, a large number of secondary sources were consulted. Throughout the writing of this book the author was ever mindful that Gandhi, in the words of George Woodcock, "never set out to develop a fixed and final doctrine, but emphasised that his practice of ahimsa or non-violence was always experimental, that his political struggle like his personal life was part of a continuing quest for Truth as manifested existentially, a quest that could never end because human understanding was incapable of comprehending the Absolute” 4. www.mkgandhi.org Page 4 Gandhi and His Ashrams NOTES 1. Joseph J. Doke, M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (Varanasi: A. B. Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1909). 2. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi : The Early Phase (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1965);Mahatma Gandhi : The Last Phase (Ahmedabad : Navajivan P. H., 1966), and Mahatma Gandhi: The Discovery of Satyagraha on The Threshold (Bombay: Sevak Prakashan, 1980). 3. Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: New American Library, 1954); The Life of Mahatma Gandhi 2 Vols. (Bombay : Bharatiya Vidya Bhawan, 1951); B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi, A Biography (London : Unwin Books, 1965); Geoffrey Ashe, Gandhi: A Study in Revolution (London : Heinemann, 1968); Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi (London The Bodley Head, 1969); and George Woodcock, Gandhi (London : Fontana/Collins, 1972). 4. Woodcock, op. cit., p. 10. www.mkgandhi.org Page 5 Gandhi and His Ashrams 01. Gandhi and Community : The Formative Years The ashrams Gandhi established served as laboratories where he and his colleagues experimented with nonviolence as an alternative way of life. In these small monastic communities of men and women living according to absolute vows he sought to lay the ground-workforan egalitarian social organisation and economy, and to develop an education system that reflected the Indian genius. The ashrams provided economic and moral support as well as fostering the discipline and awareness necessary for their members to sustain grassroot civil disobedience. Gandhi saw the need in the tradition-bound, rigidly hierarchical Indian society, for a moral sanction able to inspire people to help themselves. He believed ashramic life, based on mutuality, simplicity and hard work, would nurture an asceticism that could bechannelled through positive action to reform society. This chapter seeks to illumine some of the formative influences upon the development of his ashram concept. Early Life Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2 October 1869, in Porbandar, a small coastal town in the Kathiawar Peninsula in western India. The Gandhis were Modh banias, a merchant caste, who were grocers traditionally. However, Gandhi's family had become hereditary Dewans or Prime Ministers of Kathiawar. The primary written source of Gandhi's experiences as a child and youth in the middle-class Hindu-Jain environment in Kathiawar during the 1870s and 1880s is his autobiography which was written many years later, as he was approaching sixty. There is little doubt that these early recollections were adapted to meet the moral needs and practical expediences of the period duringwhich he wrote. Memories can connect past and present happenings and are an important part of the actuality in which they emerge. The book was written in serial form as a vehicle of self-appraisal and self-analysis, and as a moral and spiritual guide for his followers. Though many of the events described have most likely been distorted by memory, the book furnishes important insights into the www.mkgandhi.org Page 6 Gandhi and His Ashrams phenomenon of Gandhi's development as a social and political activist and theoretician, and stands as a poignant study of the religious impulse in man. Gandhi's parents were devout followers of Vishnu, the Hindu god who, it is believed, from time to time became incarnate to rehabilitate the world. His father was a righteous man who regularly went to the temple, heard religious discourses and towards the end of his life devoted much of his time to religious matters. Gandhi admired his father who clearly had qualities of leadership and was greatly respected in the community, but his mother had the strongest moral and spiritual influence upon him.