Gandhi's life and message for the world

Gandhi

Fischer, Louis. Gandhi: His Life and Message for the world. 1954.

The author Louis Fischer attempts to present the life and thoughts of the great Indian nationalist, pacifist, and Indian spiritual leader in a way that is comprehensible to Westerners. Fischer was an American journalist who had met with Gandhi on several occasions before writing this text, after Gandhi's assassination. Fischer considered Gandhi one of the greatest men he had ever met. Over the course of the book, Fischer justifies his project of reconstructing the life of against charges that it was too intimate a look into the man's life and focused too much on biographical details. The author stresses that it is consistent with the way that Gandhi used his own personal spiritual quest during his lifetime as a kind of map or blueprint for his political project for the independence of India from British rule, and the freedom of all people, regardless of race, creed, or caste.

The book begins with the end of the man's life, with Gandhi's assassination. The first part of the text mainly deals with Gandhi's struggles in South Africa, the second section with Gandhi's involvement in the Indian independence movement and his conversion to nonviolent resistance, and the third section with the tumultuous pre-independence negotiations, partition and the end. Rather than constructing his subject as a private person, Fisher stresses that Gandhi believed in revealing himself and regarded secrecy as the enemy of freedom-not only the freedom of India but the freedom of humanity. Fisher deflates the common notion that Gandhi was perfect, and never struggled within himself, as he fought for freedom by using Gandhi's biography, and his engagement with the author on a personal level, as its own text. This also shows how the author acknowledges his own subjectivity, including his admiration for his subject.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how Gandhi explains to Fisher how he came to accept his Indian nationality and spiritual faith. Originally, as a man born in the British Empire, he was enamored of British ways and customs. Gandhi's family came from the Indian Vaisyna caste of merchants (the word "Gandhi" means grocer in Sanskrit), and initially strove for social success by training as a lawyer and getting married. Gandhi's father died when he was young, and he struggled with his mother against some of her beliefs, including the vegetarianism that he was later to embrace. Gandhi did not regret these early struggles, saying he was glad he chose to accept vegetarianism, for example, in a mindful fashion, rather than to merely accept it as a custom. A willingness to challenge unsubstantiated beliefs and political ideology, such as the caste system, of both British and Indian nationals, was at the core of Gandhi's philosophy. Fischer suggests that such moral courage was how Gandhi was able to risk, and to dare so much, over the course of his lifetime.

The South African section of the text also shows that although Gandhi was politically active early on in his life, even before his great conversion from Western ways, his political and spiritual beliefs came as the result of a personal life journey. While in South Africa, he protested against apartheid. Later, he would break caste barriers and minister to the untouchables of India, stressing the need to bring all people together under the newly developing nation-state. But Gandhi said this revelation of the oneness of all peoples only came to him after he was denied a seat on a stagecoach in South Africa. The racist driver made the young Indian lawyer sit outside in the hot sun on a long trip to Pretoria because of the color of his skin. Gandhi sued the railroad company and won. Suddenly, he found within himself new courage, the courage to be spokesman for all powerless peoples.

Gandhi drew his nonviolent philosophy from the New Testament as well as Hindu spiritual teachings, and made nonviolent, public acts of resistance the hallmark of his resistance to British rule. Later on, Gandhi's spiritual conversion involved his adoption of a celibate lifestyle arose as way to discipline himself, not because he rejected sex as immoral. Open and honest with Fisher, Gandhi admits this made ordinary relations between his wife and himself difficult at times. This personal explication in the text, however, is not prurient, merely to show that Gandhi was all encompassing in his use of personal spiritual techniques as well as his political philosophy.

The crux of the text involves the narration of how Gandhi made great symbolic, nonviolent acts the core of his mission, such as his great trek across India to protest the salt tax, an act that accumulated with his taking of salt from the ocean. After the partition, one of his greatest pains was still the continued conflict between Hindus and Muslims on the Indian subcontinent.