Gandhi in the 1920's to Bardoli (1929)
Presented on: Thursday, July 28, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Gandhi
Presentation 4 of 13
Gandhi in the 1920s to Bardoli, 1928: Refining the Spiritual Movement
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, July 28, 1983
Transcript:
Today is July 28, 1983. This is the fourth lecture in a series of lectures on Gandhi. Tonight's lecture is entitled: Gandhi in the 1920s to Bardoli, 1928: Refining the Spiritual Movement.
Gandhi in the 1920s is the archetypal sage in our time. He is remarkably different from almost anyone else in our time because of the powerful synthesis that he attempted to manifest. And I can think of nothing more powerful than the image of the spinning wheel. And the spinning wheel was called the charkha. The charkha. And the charkha was for Gandhi at this time the symbol of everything that he was attempting to manifest. And as a matter of fact, they had a very difficult time finding a spinning wheel. And there was a great search that went on. And in his autobiography, he records, in chapter 40, found at last. He wrote, "I poured out my grief about the charkha. And this woman lightened my burden by a promise to prosecute and furnished an incessant search for the spinning wheel."
At last, after no end of wandering in Gujarat, Gangabehn found the spinning wheel in the Vijapur in Baroda state. Quite a number of people there had spinning wheels in their homes, but had long since consigned them to the attics as useless lumber. They expressed to Gangabehn their readiness to resume spinning if someone promised to provide them with the regular supply of the slivers and to buy the yarn spun by them.
So, she brought the news back and Gandhi had this archaic spinning wheel set up. And a circle of the profound thinkers of the Gandhian movement looked at this item, worked with it, played with it, thought about it. and they came to the decision that there were certain changes that would have to be made in the structure of it. And eventually they came up with a spinning wheel which laid flat. And when you drew the yarn out from it, it come out clean. But you have to bring it up about this high. The original spinning wheel was actually shaped like spokes of double **(inaudible a few words)** And it's kind of a rickety sort of thing. So that when it went around and the thread would further along on the outside edge like that, it would come together.
It had an odd sound like a miniature windmill. And it was exactly this sound, this psychological white sound, background sound, that drew Gandhi's attention to the fact that this was a therapy in this activity. Of using the hands, bringing the hands together in a focus, to produce a thread of meaning that could be utilized and woven into a fabric. And fabric made into clothing. And that all the while the hum of the spinning wheel was like the song of a mother wind calming the incredible anxieties of the dumb millions of Indians.
And you have to realize here that the population of India at this time was 350 million people. And what Gandhi was looking for was a way to approach the 350 million people. He didn't want to approach 1 million or the top hundred thousand. Or even 10 million. Or even a hundred million. He wanted to approach everybody and this was his incessant genius. Was that for him democracy meant everyone. And his idea of a satyagraha democracy meant that everyone had the right to participate in it. And it's almost like the ancient doctrine in umm Buddha's salvation, that all sentient life must be saved. That anywhere in the universe, in whatever form it occurs, sentient life has in its capacity to manifest as life a sacred quality. And that all of it must be saved. Because the purpose is to net the total pattern from ignorance to enlighten. And so for Gandhi the number one problem was to find tools which would penetrate down to every single person in India. So that the charkha became for him the basic instrument. And became for those who were looking over his shoulder the basic symbol of Indian freedom.
As a matter of fact a book which is very hard to find by J. B. Kripalani, Politics of Charkha. This is the first edition of 1946. It took me about nine years to find this. And it's interesting that in here Kripalani makes a point of saying that the charkha as an instrument of the individual human being was purposely set against an impossible polarity. That had frozen the economic and political situation of India into an impasse. And the impasse was set up in the following way. That there was one side the concentration of power and economic leverage in the wealthy few who then translated that hegemony into large factory systems. So that the image and the fact of the gigantic factory, big business, the systematizing of industry to a nationwide. At that time they were only worried about nationwide. We today face a much more serious problem as you might guess. The problem then was the big factory. And in order to sustain that phenomenon of the large factory you had to have a population of persons who were workers in that factory. And Kripalani points out that what happens here is that human beings are no longer slaves. But they are made to see that they had better cooperate and become willing workers, else they will be outside of the security which is offered by the work in the large factories. So, he says we have an increasing population of people who are worse than slaves because they are willing rationalizing workers who are protecting their security and producing a gulf between themselves and the rest of the population who have no access to the security. And in this way the large factory system is working as a lover upon the immorality of the Indian psyche. And producing successively in generations of Indians a degeneracy in the capacity to even view themselves as independent human beings.
And to go along with this they were subjected to an educational system that was developed in 19th century England to produce a clerk mentality in the English population. So that the English people would cooperate with this emerging industrial state. So that they would fit in to the large corporate idea. All this was developed in the 1830s, 1840s. When we have time will go into the development of that. Next year you see that. And then that system was put on top of the Indian population. So that increasingly any Indian citizen who felt that he had emerged, that he'd become secure, was proud of the fact that he was able to say join the Indian Civil Service. Or he was able to work in a factory. And so, the very purposes of ambition for individuals were to scramble like mad to fight against their own fellow countrymen for positions of being willing slaves in these kinds of conditions.
And this was the immorality that Gandhi was trying to highlight. That we may have morality only when individuals are able to see their lives as a whole and decide how that is going to manifest for themselves. And not in terms of something else. But the problem was actually one of universal meaning. The factories became a great positive pole and the population of ignorant, duped workers became a negative pole. And so any solution that offered itself to redress either the positive or the negative part of this pole became swept into the vortex of the polarity inherent in the structure of the whole undertaking. That is to say any ecology of human activity has a sealed energy structure which runs through it. We today with late twentieth century anthropology can even characterize, very accurately, the structure of a cultural power ecology. The French anthropologists, especially like Claude Levi-Strauss and philosophers like Jacques Derrida have gone into this extensively. But at this time Gandhi working with himself as a barometer of honesty. As an unviable human being who wished to only be of service to his fellow, looked upon the charkha as not participating in either the positive or the negative aspects of this power ecology. But rather taking outside of this whole frame of reference the focus of everything that he wished to establish. And in perceiving this he began to realize increasingly as 1920, 1921 came to pass as will see that the charkha in order to be effective had to spread through the entire population. And that if the entire population were to use the charkha, they would have to understand that the use of the charkha meant non-cooperation with the power situation of the polarity. That is the factories and the ignorance were the poles of an ignorant polarity. And by using the charkha they were also to understand that they were rejecting that whole scale of measurement. That they were no longer to delude themselves that their lives and their value and the purposes of their friends and of their neighbors could be gauged and judged in terms of this measuring rod that they were to non-cooperate en masse 350 million people. And the charkha was the beginning instrument to enable them to say no to that measuring system. That the rule of Imperial mentality was not appropriate to measure the whole soul of a human being. And that in fact the easiest way to say no with this hand was to spin with this hand. So that the charkha lifted man out of this frozen limbo, this polarity. Out of this illusion of the measurement of the imperialist rule of that time. But the danger was, as Gandhi saw, that in order to effectively use the energy that would come from this, of using the charkha, this was going to produce, as it always does in reality an energy. A population of people who in waking up from a nightmare that they had been anesthetized in, would suddenly realize that they had been had. And had been duped for generations. And this always is a great shock. It's a shock to the individual. It's a shock to the people to realize that they've been lied to. That they've been manipulated. And the waking up from those lies and the detaching of the elements of that manipulation always produce on one hand an elated sense at last and free I can do something with my life. But at the same time a concomitant feeling of how dare they have done this to me.
So, in order to keep together those two aspects, which are a new polarity, Gandhi used the charkha to engender the sense of non-cooperation on an India wide scale for 350 million people. But he brought in the philosophy of civil disobedience for those whose energy level had been arisen. For those whose social insight had come up to understand this incredible travesty of human justice. So that those individuals who found themselves not only non-cooperating but having a need to do something else to fight against this, would have a way to do it which would be commensurate with the non-cooperation. So that civil disobedience became an essential element for the smaller group. The smaller en masse. Which amounted to actually tens of thousands of people. And in some cases, hundreds of thousands of people. But it was relatively a selection a self-selection from the mass non-cooperation population. So that the charkha became a plumb bob in the architecture of meaning of the Gandhian vision of the world. And the first line of sight was not a cooperation by using this tool.
And the second line of sight, if you could see this horizon and work with it, was the added responsibility of civil disobedience. And this civil disobedience was styled satyagrahas. And they were put together. They were collected together. Bunched together in specific campaigns so that there would be discipline in order. So that this tremendous energy would actually be applied to conditions that needed to have it applied to. There were fights that needed to be fought. And there was a cry for satyagraha warriors to enter against this war of immorality against the soul of man. Because eventually Gandhi's language centered around characterizing this situation as a primordial war that is going on in the world. and that at a time where the conditions become unbearable for man it is God who sends help. And in this case, he was careful to say I am not a saint I have no visions from God. But I am a practical idealist in that I will never give up looking for the clues and individuals around myself of what to do next. And my purpose is the same as the saint might be. I would like to introduce religion into politics. But he was always careful to say I am in fact not a saint I have no visions other than the explorations day-to-day and year to year which are absolutely public to everyone. So that if I have a secret my secret is my one hundred percent visibility itself. That's the only secret.
Kripalani uses a couple of interesting phrases in The Politics of Charkha. He says reviewing past histories, and by this time there were many educated people who were beginning to collect themselves around Gandhi. And they understood English history. They understood European history. They understood the Greeks, the Romans. They understood the history of India. The Moslem invasions. They understood the histories of China. And he observed he says nothing seems to ever finally be settled in the present-day world. That in other cultures in other times of history there seemed to be at least apexis of settlement where conditions came together. Whereas in our time in the 20th century nothing ever seems to be settled. And Gandhi's reply to that was, "We live in a time of universal man. And the only settlement we will ever discover and be able to live with is a settlement that the entire world can live with. Because humanity now as a whole must learn to balance itself upon the planet. And that there is no longer any wedge of humanity that can claim to hold the leverage in the balance. Mankind as a whole must balance himself."
And this is why there are seemingly no final resolutions in our time. The second part was that with the charkha, one had a physical tool, an instrument, that you could give physically, to any person. And they could sit down and learn to spin. And learn how to weave this yarn into fabric. And sell that fabric for a few annas, as they said at that time in the designation of the money. In order to at least buy enough food for that day. So that you could earn enough - if you were a starving or an ignorant peasant - from khadi, which is what they called the cloth, khadi. You could earn enough every day to buy your food, so that you could sustain yourself at least. And you could come to understand that through your own efforts, through the focusing of your own hands, through the diligence of your own labor on a daily basis you could live. And that this would take away the worst part of the nightmare of life; that one is totally abandoned without any possibility and that life becomes an abyss; that one's own capacities are the threat and resistance which jail you into subservience to immoral acts and immoral systems. So that in this one fell stroke Gandhi found the instrument to free anyone who would do it, psychologically and economically, from the impossible conundrums that had arisen in India in the early 1920s.
But in addition to the non-cooperation. In addition to the charkha was the civil disobedience. Now of course it was from Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience. If you recall, Thoreau refused to pay some tax and actually spent a night in jail in Concord. But in Civil Disobedience Thoreau makes the case that every human being has the right to recourse to law. And that in fact at the basis of all law is man's need to cooperate with life itself - with the conditions of reality. And that the higher law is that man should present his case in his sense of justice really to the universe, to the divine. And so Civil Disobedience is a reminding by specific act that those who administer laws and have authority have it invested them in a temporary circumstance. That it is not a permanent universal circumstance. You have control temporarily. And you have control on specific basis which can be enumerated - called laws - and that your authority is only as good as your judgment in administering these laws. If you transgress against larger context of law then we have the right as conscientious individuals to offer civil disobedience of those laws. We must take the punishment if we offer civil disobedience; we must take the punishment according to the unjust laws. But in this case, we are pointing up that we are not lawbreakers per se but that we are revising the unjust application of immoral laws. And by us doing the suffering hopefully those administering the laws will make a reassessment. And the confidence, of course, in Thoreau and in Gandhi, is that all human beings not only have a conscience but they have a capacity to draw out of themselves a sense of right and wrong. That it(?) right and wrong are not inculcated in us by any particular type of education, or any particular type of society - although there are variations of right and wrong and there are variations in the way in which it manifests - we all have an interior sense of balance. And it's this balance that produces the sense of justice. The Greek word was dikaiosyne.
So that the charkha came in and addressed itself to one of the four essential corners of life: you have to have food; you have to have clothing; you have to have shelter; and you have to have some education. You have to have these four areas of life. They're the pillars. They're the legs of the chair. And the charkha dressed itself to clothing but it firmly grabbed that leg of the chair. And one was able then, as in any yoga, once one had disciplined one sense of justice and proportion about this aspect of life the rest of the patterns of life would fall into order more or less secure. So that by concentrating on this one corner yoga of the essential square of life, one got an insight into the whole. And this is what Gandhi was trying to develop among the hundreds of millions of people of India - a sense of moral education of character development, so that further steps, further experiments, and further refinements, would have a basis to rest upon.
And during the 1920s was when Gandhi began to develop the notion in himself and in his activities of developing a population that was morally awake. And his goal was to produce hundreds of millions of people who were morally awake. They may not have been able to speak English even, or even have been able to tell you what the Ramayana was, but they would have the sense of the rightness of life - the sanctity of the individual - to at least participate in his life and the gospel of bread labor' which he got from Tolstoy. That everyone has the right to work today, to eat today. We have that right as individuals.
There was another aspect hidden in this. And this was characteristic of Gandhi's genius. That wrapped up in this comprehensive program was an address to the opposition. The opposition being the educated Westerners who promulgated this civilization of factories, and headsman, and workers, and so forth. And what it was, was basically an appeal to reassess your machines. Your ideas of science. That science, if it is jail to an immoral outlook, will very quickly enslave man in a prison which he may not be able to break out. So, as Kripalani says, "for a critical in scientific study therefore the question of big factories must be dissociated from the question of the use of mechanical power." We have to learn to see these as separate issues. And further, we must un-limit the scope of science. We have to free science from its present superstition. That science may only manifest itself in large power plays, with large mechanical conveniences, run by large states or large corporations. That science is a proliferation of power. That in fact, early in the 20th century it was already seen, before it became the chronic problem which we have today. That science is in fact a tool, and a process of man, to discover truth. It is a method of truth finding. It has its own capacities to participate in satyagraha. Therefore, the satyagraha programs that Gandhi offered which were often characterized by the bad press as being medieval - "He's against the 20th century; He's against science; He's against machines" - was a purposeful ossification on the part of a yellow prince, on the part of a mischaracterizing, abdicating, legal position because, essentially wrapped up in the charkha was the example that any man has the right to have a science of his self to learn the basics of inquiry - of using instruments for himself. And if he has to start with the charkha to make his daily clothes - let it be. let it be.
We're going to then wake up the aspect of scientific thought from its crippling innuendo that it must serve the big - it must serve the powerful - so that scientists also need to be awoken from this daydream of ignorance. And they too have been subjected to this measuring-rod of the bigness and the control. This was incidentally in the1920s; this was 65 years ago.
So that in the charkha then the landless person, the person for whom there was no tomorrow, had an edge, had a capacity at least to come out. And with Gandhi he made sure that this was seen by everyone. In the various collections of writings of Gandhi there's one little one called Khadi. Which... of which is about the handspun cloth, and he makes this series of statements which I'll just excerpt for you - they're interesting.
To make India like England and America is to find some other races, some other places of the earth for exploitation. So far it appears that the Western nations have divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation. And that there are no new worlds to discover. What can be the fate of India trying to aid the West? Indeed, the West already in itself has a surfeit of industrialism and exploitation.
And he goes on with this. And this of course written in 1926. He says, inter(?)
Industrialism is I am afraid going to be a curse for mankind. Exploitation of one nation by another cannot go on for all time. Industrialism depends entirely upon your capacity to exploit on foreign markets being open to you and on the absence of competitors."
And of course, factors promoting this are becoming less and less every day. The annual milking of the Indian economy was some sixty million rupees a year, which at that time was quite a large sum of money in India. The immorality of it, to Gandhi, was not so much that they were being built by a scam, or that they were being sapped economically - as the very fact that the spiritual capacities of man were being anesthetized enmasse by the propagation that this was all right to do, because those who knew better were doing it for you - and that it was this point that Gandhi always looked for in a campaign of satyagraha - this aspect. And the telling part on the population, and Gandhi would always ask the question and we'll see it, do the people understand what offering satyagraha will mean? And, are they prepared to lose everything, including their lives for it? Because you will only agree to lose everything including your life if you realize that it is a moral issue. There are many self-sacrificing moments in life. But the only one that holds up under the test of fire, in long-range decision-making and judgment, hard judgments, day in and day out and sometimes a year later you have to come back to it and decide. Are you willing to give your life up for this? And the only reason that really finally occurs to you is that this is a moral travesty against the spirit of man. And it cannot go on. You may offer of satyagraha.
So that Gandhi writes in The Laws of Khadi Economics he says,
I have found that the time has come for khadi workers to emphasize more than ever before the necessity of greater concentration and the observance of the laws of khadi economics. Some of them are essentially different from those that govern general economics. Thus, as a rule articles manufactured in one place are sent or attempted to be sent to all parts of the world. Those who manufacture the articles need not use them at all. Not so with khadi. Its peculiarity is that it has to be used where it is produced. Preferably by the spinners and weavers themselves. Thus, the demand for khadi when thus used is automatically ensured. And it also mitigates against the collecting of large masses of it to be held in some neutral place to be distributed at discount where needed and sold at high prices where needed. In other words, it strikes at the heart of decentralization. That power is able to tyrannize only when it is collected. The fingers, when they're unclenched from the fist, become articulate.
And so, the motion that Gandhi was attempting to introduce was an economic practice - not a theory, but an economic practice that would unclench the fists of centralized systemic authority and open up the hand of friendship for men to each other. So that they would stop thinking about making a profit off his neighbor. Or stop banding together so they could make a profit off those other people. So that they could realize that everyone has the capacity and the moral right to bread labor. To earn his livelihood by daily work. And that the experience of making his own cloth, of selling a little bit that he had made today for a little sum of money, was not just to make the little sum of money. And not just to make the little act of that cloth. But to teach himself over and over again a daily lesson in the humility of reality that we must all survive together. And this produces a whole different outlook on what economics is. Then the economic rule is not so much the profit line but the wholeness of the motion of life for everyone.
In order to found this in an even more indelible way, Gandhi took this entire practice and placed the next level of manifestation in the village. So that just as every individual had the right and would have the capacity to earn his own basic living. Every village would have a chance to understand that it could produce almost everything it needed within the village itself. So that as you were producing moral, independent human beings by the hundreds of millions you were producing village republics by the hundreds of thousands. 700,000 villages in India at that time. So that Gandhian workers along with offering satyagraha campaigns, using the civil disobedience technique - not to siphon away the excess energy but to put it to use on the other hand because there's always another development. The wise always realize that if you have of this you have to have that too.
So that the active program, the building up program, went to the villages. And Gandhian workers began going all over India out into the countryside. They would come with their khadi clothes and khadi caps sometimes and little satchels, with maybe one or two books and a charkha and to the village. And most villages would have a head man or some elders or... They would sit down and pretty soon in the evening after the work was done around the fires - maybe before, maybe after of telling a few stories from the Mahabharata or the Ramayana - there would be a discussion of what this is. And how you do it. And what it's for. And that these Gandhian workers would say we're not going back to the big city. We're not here just on a vacation. We're going to be here. We're going to live in this area. We're going to go from village to village and maybe we'll be within a 20-mile radius. And we're going to live here and stay here.
And in connection with that program we have to introduce now a major actor on the scene. Because as Gandhi was developing the Charter and khadi and the village program, there came to him one day a young Brahman, still a teenager, and his name was Vinoba Bhave. And he came in and he had grown up - his mother then quite religious - and he'd grown up offering food to untouchables and all kinds of acts that were frowned upon for nice Brahman boys to be indulging in. And Vinoba came to Gandhi. And almost at the very beginning, late 1916, 1917. And Gandhi after talking to him for the most part of the day said, "you are a giant, but you do not know this world at all. You need to have a little seasoning. I want you to go out for a year. And I want you to go out and just work and see India...
END OF SIDE 1
...and experience life." And he did.
And Gandhi reports somewhere in his writing that to the day and to the hour a year later Vinoba came back and was ready. And Gandhi realizing that he had a real gem on his hands - somebody of unusual capacity - gave to Vinoba the assignment to go to the geographic center of India. Which at that time actually had a small village nearby named Wardha - right in the geographic desert center of India - Madhya Pradesh I think it is in - and there he set up an ashram. And there he set himself to doing what Gandhi had asked him to do. He said "I want you to study the religions and history of mankind and I want you to do village work. And when I need you I will call you." And so Vinoba went there and he was called about 25 years later in the second world war when Gandhi needed somebody really powerful and special to initiate a very difficult satyagraha.
In 1940 he had the exact instrument refined to a fine point by that time. And what Vinoba did all that time was to study every major language of the world. So that he could read all the major religious texts in their original. He learned Arabic and English, Greek and Russian, and all Indian languages, Chinese - he learned them all - and patiently went through the process of developing a school for village children. Teaching how to sweep out and keep clean the various parts of the village.
And not too far from Wardha was opened up a great ashram which today is called Sevagram - seva is service. Gram. Seva-gram, yes - Service village. Gram is a village. And this Sevagram is quite a center of experiments in the constructive program of developing new tools and new experiments and new capacities to do health. All this is very much alive. I know you don't read about it in papers. When we get to Vinoba you'll see how much alive it is - there are tens of millions of people in India today living under these ground dances he began to call them the 50s.
But he came in 1916, 17 and Gandhi sent him off. And so many talented people were presenting themselves to Gandhi. And all through 1918, 1919, 1920 Gandhi became everyone's advisor. He was the honest individual who would not lie to you. He's not going to make anything up. He's enormously experienced. And yet he's able to play with reality. And so, the talented individuals began coming and collecting themselves around Gandhi.
And he went of course to the Champaran in 1917. He came back and there was a need to develop an ashram outside of Ahmedabad on the Sabarmarti River. But there, there was a strike going on by the mill workers against the Indian textile producers. It was a curious situation because Gandhi was friends with the owners of the textile mills - they knew him personally - and he had been asked by the workers to lead a satyagraha against these people. And so, Gandhi, inspecting the program and realizing that this was a real chance to offer something. And the whole story is written up by his first secretary Mahadev Desai in, A Righteous Struggle: A Chronicle of the Ahmedabad Textile Laborers Fight for Justice. In this after the strike had gone on for a couple of weeks Gandhi began to notice that the individuals who were offering satyagraha began to waiver. And even though they had daily meetings and they made pledges of staying to their word, keeping on with the struggle, he could see that they were flagging. And to him it was a moral issue. He was the one who had encouraged them to begin on this. And so, he felt that he was responsible for their moral wavering. And it occurred to him then - through the inner voice within - that the only recourse that he had was to offer a purification fast for himself. And that until the strike was settled, he would no longer eat. And he says in many places that he realized this could be construed as coercion against the mill owners who knew and loved him very much. And he cautioned them to say don't give in on account of me. But of course, you can form your own judgement of what they thought. And he said they rightfully criticized me for twisting their arms. Three days after the fast began the strike was settled. And the mill owners distributed sweets and candies underneath a tree where the pact had been signed. And then it was a tremendous commotion. And tens of thousands of people rushed to try and get these sweets. So, they had to redistribute them later on in another way. And Gandhi investigating, trying to see if there was a lack of discipline at the very moment of victory, realized that word had leaked out and all the beggars and starving from Ahmedabad had crossed the river and had gone there to receive these sweets. Because they were starving. That it wasn't a mad rush to get one share of the goodies it was a pell-mell fight for survival. The reminder and sobered by this fact that there were so many human beings in a desperate straight just to keep alive that Gandhi renewed himself and the next series of satyagrahas became increasingly important for him as training ground - training ground for bringing together an elite group of individuals. Elite in the sense that they would go through these campaigns year in and year out. They would offer themselves up for jail, for punishment, whatever the situation demanded.
And as this developed the situation in the world also began to change. The First World War had come to an end. But in the First World War one of the participants against England had been Turkey - and Turkey was a Muslim country - and the Muslims in India were by religious law supposed to support their Muslim brothers against the English. The innuendos of this came to arise when the post-World War settlement took away certain powers from the head of the Turkish state. It was also a religious leader and what was known as the Khilafat Movement - named after the caliph - the Khilafat Movement arose in 1919 and rose to a crescendo in the early 1920s. And in this movement Gandhi, more than any other time, sensed that the fuse in India that went to the deepest part of its structure was the Hindu Muslim enmity - that somehow this religious clash was the deepest fracture in the very structure of Indian life.
Now all through 1920 and on into 1921, when the non-cooperation movement rose in a great massive tidal wave, Gandhi addressed himself more and more to the fractured elements of Indian life. He addressed himself to the untouchables. And instead of calling them untouchables he called them harijans - children of God.' He addressed himself to the problem of women - that women had been kept under the thumb, as it were, for an awful long time over many issues. And to him half of humanity was exactly women. But the better half of humanity in that their nature and character, their functions in society, had prepared them more to understand the whole wholeness of life. The ecology of what all the activities is like when you put them together. They had to run families, they had to run the whole sense of life. So that women became for Gandhi a primordial hitherto untapped resource. And Gandhi more than any reformer in history tapped the source of women's power. Not as a differential element so much, but as a needed balance for the whole. That there was to be no real society and changes without consulting the sensibilities and intelligences and perspectives of women. And so that you found in 1920, for the first time I think in history anywhere, literally tens of thousands of women participating as equals in a political process in a revolutionary reforming of society. And before it was over there would literally be millions of women in the movement.
All during this time Gandhi became more and more the individual to whom everyone worked. He is described by Krishnadas - a friend of his and a friend of Kripalani - at that time constantly busy, always writing, always conferring. And occasionally in pauses he would look up and Krishnadas says, he would smile, and in this smile, it was like the sun shining. That all of a sudden you realized that in the midst of all of this tremendous capacity which he had, what struck one to the quick was his lovability. That here was an honest human being after all. An honest human being. And that somehow it was heartening to have someone like that on your side. But the fact that there was someone like that in the world was a heartening encouragement that human beings come in that variety too. They come honest to the core, and that was an encouragement. And of course, his bringing in individuals was constantly making a new society.
Education also for him became a structure. If we're going to educate human beings, he says, we have to get away from the idea that they first need a literary education. They don't need to have read English literature in order to develop the sense of moral character, he said. So, we have to begin with handicrafts. We have to educate the individual to be able to work for himself, to participate in the world as a human being, and through the handicraft emphasis, education would then tend to have a practical focus upon the life of the individual rather than on the mind of an individual. As long as we think of people only as their minds, we are thinking in terms of ideas which will appeal to them - ways to sell those ideas, ways to argue against wrong ideas - and all this, if not grounded well, is a play of illusion. It is in fact the worst sort of illusion, because it produces a self-rationalizing tendency in oneself, that you convince yourself through your own mind that what you're doing is all that can be done. How could anyone do anything else? And of course, under this anesthetized sense of conscience all the crimes of history have been committed. You cannot lead moral individuals enmasse into travesties of justice. They will not do it. They will not go. And so, the sinequanon of freedom is an enlightened population. The more that are capable of saying no if they have to the better for all.
So, in this development through the 1920s, Gandhi became finally in late 1920 at the National Convention of the Indian National Congress the sole repository of political power in India. He became a de facto dictator. There was only one stipulation on him - that he not give in to the British government. And he had realized finally that he could no longer cooperate with a system of evil as he saw it. That he... that he had been an honest British citizen for 50 years. And that he had finally come to see that what was wrong was not so much the economic exploitation or even the political exploitation but it was the moral degradation of man's spirit and he could no longer cooperate with that. And so, Gandhi began the year of 1921 as the sole exclusive general in charge of an army of three hundred and fifty million people.
Well let's take a break and come back. I'll be earning my livelihood on the sidewalk.
There are there are any number of volumes available in the bookstore on Gandhi. I... I've been working in this literature for about 15 years so I'm fairly well acquainted with it. I'm going to give you a couple of insights and excerpts from a few of them. The best, I think, general life of Gandhi is from Louis Fisher, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. Fisher visited Gandhi in 1942 - spent a week with him. I think the temperature never went below 100. Sometimes around 120 degrees. And the Fisher would have to take showers every 3 or 4 hours. He said the remarkable thing was that the equanimity of Gandhi was an equanimity in the midst of this torrential heat. The population of people. The incredible press of world opinion. He said the man was quiet and spiritually delightful in the midst of a whirlpool. And how does he do it? How does he do it?
This is from Krishnadas who was, who wrote Seven Months with Mahatma Gandhi in 1921. And in Chapter 11 he gives this little scenario at the beginning of the day, at the Ashram.
"At 4 o'clock in the morning the sacred hour before sunrise, the Ashram bell rings to rouse the inmates from their sleep. That ringing sound penetrates your ears and awakens your slumbering consciousness. But this call - is it merely a call to you to shake off the slumber of your body, or does it betoken also a call to awaken your slumbering soul? From every quarter of the Ashram are heard voices of awakened people and soon with rapid steps they are seen repairing to the place of prayer meeting where they all assemble at the proper time. The Dawn is still fast asleep in the lap of Night her beloved maid of honor who protects her sleeping Queen from the world's gaze with her thousand flashing eyes. [the stars] The keen rays of those eyes fill every quarter of the heavens. [So, they're gathering under starlight before dawn even begins - together.] In front the sweet murmur of the running river... [the Sabarmati which is the large river] ...heard like an indistinct sound of music wafted from afar through some unknown region breaks in upon the solemn stillness. On a sudden blending its harmony with this note of music, ... [the river under the Starlight] ...is heard the note of prayer uttered in chorus by a hundred throats."
And there's a translation of the prayer which they would utter to begin the day, "This morning I worship the Great Being Who is beyond the reach of Mind and Speech by whose favor the Eternal Sound receives its primal energy to whom the Vedas point by the words. Not this. Not this, Who is the great Lord to whom all gods bow in reverence. Who is the self-existent, immutable and primal being.' Then follow songs of praise in salutation to the earth... [Blessing the earth.] ... to Sarawati, to the Guru, to Vishnu, and to Shiva."
That is to the earth, to incarnations of energy and so forth. So that under the starlight, before the day begins there is this consecration of themselves together as a community to the great being. And then joyful songs to the four corners of the manifestation of reality. Form, energy ground and so forth.
"Then the devotee places at the Lotus Feet of his Lord the yearnings of his heart in the following terms - [And this is translated] I yearned not for earth, nor heaven, nor even freedom from rebirth, but my heart's yearning is to relieve the woes of suffering humanity. May the peoples be happy! May the rulers of the earth following the path of righteousness protect their peoples! May good ever attend the world'."
And later on, the cry of blessings that the noble would teach to the millions was if you have to chant to some King, chant victory to the earth. She needs us to help. Victory to the earth, to the wholeness of humanity.
So, this is how the days would begin. And Gandhi of course never slept very much. 3-4 hours at the most. And he would be awake hours before anybody would even start. And he would be sitting up, writing, getting correspondence, doing his prayers, doing his abolitions. And all the time thinking. But not thinking with that rationalistic mind that we've come to equate with thinking. But thinking with tones of resonant wholeness. Sensing how the patterns are unfolding. Sensing how the parallels are beginning to mount up. Getting the temperature of the spiritual capacities of the people around him. Taking stock by letting resonate in himself the images and the aspects that were of counting at that time, for that day or that period. And in this way thinking. In this way writing.
And as all of this developed, he began to will through 1921 this miraculous year, almost sole command of a great segment of the Earth's population. And [Rabindranath] Tagore who had come back from several years in Europe was absolutely astounded at the change that had come over India. He had left and India was its eternal confused state with everything under the Sun. Someone once described India as all-time in the present. That the future in the past were all saved and they were all there at the same time. And he came back from Europe after several years there and India was on its feet and running. The entire population. And he said there was some sense of incredible solemnity running like an undercurrent through the entire population of India. Hundreds of millions of people. That in his experience the only description that came to his mind was the description of the tense days before the French Revolution in 1789. When there was talk of turning the calendar back to day one and starting humanity all over again. So that this enormous elan had been engendered by Gandhi.
And in many publications like this one the 1921 movement reminiscences, you find reveries on the part of people years later. In this case decades later. Even whole lifetimes later. Of what an incredible year 1921 was. The development of this enormous sense of capacity. That human beings do not need to look for the expert to lead them but they can engender in themselves a sense of participation. And that this flows then like an electric current through all the population. And Gandhi, of course, became the talisman of the honest person leading this drive.
And in this drive, he began to focus upon the area known as Bardoli. And he wanted to have a satyagraha offered there in the Bardoli district. And as he developed his sense of strategy and this was going to be a lesson for the nation. This is going to be a showcase. And as the energies rose in this regard, there was a report of violence elsewhere in India. Where a number of people had been killed. And so, Gandhi said we cannot wield this powerful weapon, more powerful than any that man has determined with this moral blotch upon ourselves. And he called off the campaign. And it was the first time in history that any enormous mass movement like this, poised ready to go to an area and change history, was suddenly called off because one man felt that the moral qualities had been impugned. And that even as small as it had been impugned, they could not proceed. And so, in the midst of this tremendous capacity to develop energy, Gandhi showed his control over the flow and the application of this energy.
He had written during 1921 increasingly articles that was pointed. His articles in Young India 1920, 1921, are paradigms of crisp, forceful writing which transcends the journalistic background which Gandhi had and which his writing often displays. And his encouragement for Indians to learn to say no. not only to the British but to a mentality that they had supposed superior and omnipresent. To say no to it. And his language had come to describe the condition. Even as the title of one article was, "Tampering with Loyalty." He said I have no hesitation in saying that it is sinful for anyone either soldier or civilian to serve this government. Sedition has become the Creed of Congress. Non-cooperation though a religious and strictly moral movement deliberately aims at the overthrow of this government and is therefore legally seditious. We ask for a no order and we expect none from this government.
So, they grabbed him. They dragged him before a magistrate. He said, I will save the Court's time. You need not present a case to prove what I have openly stated all my life. And now have written by my own hand. And if you believe in your sense of justice you will give me the stiffest penalty you can. And the magistrate sentenced him to six years in prison. Yerawada - the prison. Yerawada was expected. In fact, when Gandhi has looked for a place to locate his Sabarmati Ashram, he had gone with his friend S. B. Patel - who later became one of the great leaders of India - had gone looking along the banks of the Sabarmati River for a location. And he had seen Yerawada Jail and he had decided that he wanted his ashram near the jail. Because he said our career is to go to this jail. This is why we are here. And I want to be close. And so, he located his ashram at the site. He also said that British always located their prisons in very clean areas. They were fastidious about that aspect. And if you knew there was a British jail around it had to be a pretty good area.
The British... I don't know any of you who have run across that particular, the old-style British Raj mentality. It's not just the British from London. It's the British who were in India who are different. The best example of it, of course, is the film Gunga Din. And the elan that Cary Grant and Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. show in that film. With the elan of the British soldier gentlemen loose in a primitive land, so called. I met the... I met two British officers from that day. One the General Shepherd and one a Colonel Travers, who have been in Skinner's horse. Skinner was about three hundred years before and he'd been a flamboyant Englishman in the early days in India. And the dress uniform of Skinner's horse was canary yellow... (inaudible) ... So, when you run your horse with your lances and your sword and your canary yellow en masse you were a streak of terror to whoever would get in your way. And he had gone back to India after twenty-five years of being away. This was 1972. And he said the old Indian soldiers wept with joy to see us back. And he said secretly I think they'd like to have us back. He said those were the good days.
So, this mentality you see was a way of life. It was a quality of derring-do mixed with effrontery. And it's a hypnotizing kind of a mix. Very easy to make part of the joyfulness of your life. Very difficult to fight against. Very difficult.
So, Gandhi was sentenced to six years early in 1922. And many people thought this was his political obituary - that he was finished. And then a couple of years later he had an acute attack of appendicitis. And in January of 1924 he had to consent to being operated on to save his life. And the British authorities, realizing that the man was now nearing 60 and in frail health and probably had burned himself out, released him in February of 1924. And before 1924 went very much further he was on a 21-day fast to protest some immoral actions. In other words, Gandhi was rebounding back. But then he began to realize that his vitality had become crimped by this long sojourn in the jail. And so, at the end of 1925 he gave over the presidency of Congress to a woman - a poetess, a very famous poetess - Mrs. Naidu. Sarojini Naidu. Did I pronounce her first name right? Sarojini Naidu. Whose poems have been translated into English and they are elegant. She was an elegant woman capable of great refinements, and also, great self-sacrifice. And she became the head - Gandhi's designated successor. And he said of himself, I will observe a year of political silence.
And so, from 1925 at the end of 1926 at the end Gandhi worked on other aspects. And it was at this time of course that he was busy writing some of his materials. The autobiography, Satyagraha in South Africa. Many of those longer items were written during this time. He was also experimenting with himself. He couldn't leave diet alone. He couldn't leave health alone. He couldn't leave these inner reforms alone. But the strain had begun to toll upon him. And in early 1927 he suffered a slight heart attack. And again, it seemed as if Gandhi were a thing of the past. And for some time, people began relating to Gandhi as if he were someone in the past. Someone who belonged to history and new persons were to come along.
And it then that history, as it so often does, comes full round, comes exactly back to the place where it left off before. And in 1928 the great Bardoli satyagraha finally went on. After almost a decade of being held in abeyance Gandhi was finally approached. And in the Bardoli satyagraha the basic issue was centered around a conception of who owns the land. Does the government own land? Does the government leaf out and rent out land to human beings? Or is there some other ownership of land? Is there some other quality of this earth which is more primal?
I remember once in Berkeley a poster that was plastered up just before the People's Park event. And it had a red silk screen of Geronimo holding his rifle. And over it in yellow print with the headline - "Who Owns the Land" - about People's Park in Berkeley. And it said this land used to belong to the Costanoan Indians who lived here from time immemorial. And this land was ripped off from them by guns by early settlers in the San Francisco Bay Area. And those been created deeds and trusts and sold those deeds to other men for money. Not paying any attention to the land. And finally, it had come to the University of California who had let it become a junkyard. Well the people of this earth are going to come in and take care of this land. And if they want it, they're going to have to fight for it again.
So, the whole issue in Bardoli was exactly this. This earth existed a primordial reality of the universe. Who is it, who owns this? Where is the root source and ground of wealth and power? Where is the final ultimate title of real estate? And of course, the answer the Gandhians would say is that this earth belongs to man in trust. To keep for all life upon the earth. No one owns this earth. This planet is free. So, in this issue as it had come up for almost a decade. Gandhi was approached finally by Mahadev Desai and a number of other individuals. And this is Desai's account of the conversation that led to the initiation of the satyagraha in 1928 and brought Gandhi right back into the center of the moving phase of world history. The development of a social yoga for man.
"This time however Gandhi gave them a long talk if he was walking to the Vidya path to give his weekly lecture there. Kalyanji opened the talk told them that they had practically covered the whole province. [They call that a Toluca in India, the whole province area.] They had practically covered this whole province area. And that it was unanimous so far as the fight was concerned. That they had done the groundwork. They had made enquiries on the village level, on the individual level. Through the entire extent of the area affected. And the people were ready to commit themselves on this issue. They would prefer to refuse payment."
And a tremendous increment had been charged over the payment of the land. From 30 percent, 20 to 30 percent.
Gandhiji: "That decides their product and said I don't quite understand that."
Kalyanji: "Well 22 percent and enhancement has been imposed the people say they would rather pay the old assessment and then refuse the 22 percent increment."
Gandhiji: "That is most dangerous governments will fight you with the help of your own money and recover the increment in a moment. No assessment can be paid until the increment is canceled. And you must plainly say to government declare the enhancement cancelled. And then take the old assessment which we are prepared to pay. Are the people prepared to take up this attitude?"
Kalyanji: "I'm not quite sure about the bigger places like Bardoli itself. Or Volland(?). For the villages in these places are naturally afraid that government might deprive them of their lands and transfer them to their original occupants. But the other villages are quite solid."
Gandhiji: "That's all right but is their cause just and their case unsaleable."
Kalyanji: "Certainly. Everyone has demonstrated it and we can see this in the articles now before us." They had written articles and given it to them.
Gandhiji: "I do not know. I have read the articles with care. But remember that you will have to keep the whole country with you. And the first condition is that your cause must be perfectly just." He meant perfectly just. It's the first and only condition under which moral warfare can be fought. Perfectly just. "Then there is another point. The people may be ready to fight but do they know the implications of satyagraha. Supposing that everyone is removed and put in prison. Will they stand together alone?"
Kalyanji: "That is more than I can say."
Gandhiji: "Well you will have to ascertain that. But what does the Patel say?"
Kalyanji: "Patel had just arrived. He said he studied the case and that he had no... adult... doubt whatsoever that the case was just."
"Well then there was nothing more to be considered," said Gandhiji. "Victory two years."
And so, they initiated this tremendous satyagraha in 1928. And brought Gandhi back into the scene. And very quickly his health, his stamina, his capacities came back in to play. But this time like an old strategic campaigner. Like an old general who's seen a lot of battles. His sense of the design of the battlefield began to take on creative aspects. And he began to look around and search around - in himself and in the conditions out there - for some really powerful fulcrum. For some battleground where the gains of the past could be solidified into a focus of indelible triumph. He realized that the 20s had produced a vast crop of capacity in the populations of India and now he wanted to bring it together and literally place it somewhere where they could easily grasp it in the simplest way possible. So that they would never ever again lose it. And in searching around for himself, Gandhi one day came to that image of primordiality which he was looking for.
And next week we'll see how a handful of salt did the trick.
END OF RECORDING