The Read on Mohandas K. Gandhi

Mohandas K. Gandhi—the Mahatma, a title he disliked; London-trained barrister, leader of the Indian independence movement, and the inventor of satyagraha: organized mass nonviolence as a political instrument, since borrowed by movements on every continent. His public method was his body: the marches walked, the cloth spun and worn, the seventeen major fasts undertaken against his own side's violence as often as against the Raj. The record's most famous entries: twenty-one years in South Africa where the method was built; the Salt March of 1930—two hundred forty miles in twenty-four days to pick up a handful of untaxed salt, which filled the jails with sixty thousand volunteers; the 1947 Calcutta fast, in which one old man's refusal to eat stopped a city's communal killing inside four days, while the Punjab, garrisoned by fifty thousand troops, burned. Assassinated January 1948, on his way to prayer, by a Hindu nationalist who considered him too generous to Muslims. His collected works run to nearly a hundred volumes, and he is read here from that record with the dents kept in.

The ashrams—Phoenix and Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, Sabarmati and Sevagram in India—working communities run on shared labor, open accounts, and rules he applied to himself first; and the Indian National Congress, which he led, left, and steered from outside by turns.

The London bar, 1888–91—a shy student who failed at public speaking so completely that he gave up his first case unable to open his mouth. The real school was South Africa: thrown off the train at Pietermaritzburg in 1893 for being brown in a first-class seat, he spent the night on the cold platform deciding, by his own later account, whether to go home or resist—and the twenty-one years that followed were the apprenticeship: petition politics learned and outgrown, the 1906 mass pledge at the Empire Theatre, jail terms studied like coursework, Tolstoy and Ruskin read and turned into farms. He called his whole life experiments with truth, and wrote up the failures with the successes.

The record, campaign by campaign, dents kept in. South Africa: the Natal Indian Congress built from nothing; the satyagraha campaigns of 1906–14—thousands jailed, the marches across the Transvaal border, the settlement with Smuts that ended the worst of the register laws; the ambulance corps he raised and led under fire in the Boer and Zulu wars, believing then in imperial citizenship—an allegiance he later repudiated, and his early South African writings carried racial attitudes toward Black Africans that the record keeps and his later life contradicted. India from 1915: Champaran 1917—the indigo tenants' case won by documented investigation, his first Indian campaign, built on affidavits by the thousand; Ahmedabad and Kheda 1918; the national movements: Non-cooperation 1920–22, called off at its peak after Chauri Chaura—the discipline that enraged his allies; the Salt March 1930 and the Dharasana raid, where drilled volunteers walked in ranks into the lathis without raising a hand, witnessed to the world's press; the Round Table 1931; the 1932 Poona fast against separate electorates, settled with Ambedkar on terms Ambedkar accepted under duress and denounced afterward—both halves stated; Quit India 1942 and the last long imprisonment, in which his wife died; the Partition he opposed, mourned, and worked against village by village—Noakhali on foot through the massacres, the Calcutta fast of 1947 that stopped a riot the army could not, and the final Delhi fast of January 1948 that forced the payment of Pakistan's treaty share against his own government's wish. Twelve days later he was shot walking to prayer. He held no office, commanded no army, owned at his death his spectacles, his sandals, his watch, and a few books; the estate of the method is the twentieth century's protest movements.

Lived and worked at the ashram through the thirties and walked behind him in Noakhali. The day never varied wherever he was: up before four, the prayer, the walk at a pace that made younger men trot, the spinning quota he owed like everyone else, and then the letters—hundreds a week, each answered, the postcard his instrument of government. The accounts were audited to the smallest coin and posted; he once held up a meeting over an unaccounted few annas, saying the movement's money was the poor man's money. The humor is the thing the statues lose: he teased everyone, himself first, and disarmed delegations by laughing before arguing. The method under pressure I saw at its extreme in Noakhali in the winter of 1946: massacre country, and he dissolved his party of workers, sent them to separate villages, and walked barefoot himself village to village through hostile ground for four months, staying in the huts of whoever would have him—presence as the entire argument. And I saw the other face at Chauri Chaura years before, told by the older workers as scripture: at the movement's absolute peak, when a mob burned twenty-two policemen alive, he called the whole national campaign off against the fury of every colleague—the decision NOT to act as the most expensive decision he ever made, and he took it alone, fasting. What must also be said: colleagues found the standard merciless—allies were held to vows they had not quite made; Dr. Ambedkar, who fought him hardest from the Dalit side, called the fasts coercion and never forgave the Poona settlement, and that argument is in the record and unresolved.

I lead a movement organization whose younger staff want escalation and whose elders preach patience. I want his actual operating method—the discipline that could stop a campaign at its peak, the fast as an instrument with rules, the accounts audited to the anna—and an honest read of the coercion critique from the Ambedkar side.