Mahatma Gandhi

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — called Mahatma, “great soul,” an honorific he bore uneasily — was the leader of India’s independence movement and a religious reformer who made political resistance into a spiritual discipline. His method, satyagraha, “holding fast to truth,” rested on a religious conviction rather than a tactical one: that truth and nonviolence belong to the structure of reality, and that suffering accepted without retaliation can convert an opponent in a way that force cannot. The premise is metaphysical before it is political. If truth (satya) is the ground of what is, and harm (hiṃsā) a departure from it, then the person who refuses to inflict harm while refusing equally to comply with injustice is not choosing a clever tactic. He is aligning himself with the way things actually stand, and accepting onto his own body the cost of the misalignment around him. Coercion changes behavior; self-suffering, on this account, changes the heart that produces the behavior — and only the second is durable, because only the second touches truth.

Porbandar, Gujarat, and a Jain-steeped childhood

He was born on 2 October 1869 at Porbandar, a small princely-state port on the Kathiawar coast of Gujarat, into a family of the Modh Bania merchant caste. His father and grandfather had served as dewan — chief minister — to local rulers; the household was Vaishnava Hindu, devoted to Vishnu in his Krishna and Rama forms, and its piety was strict about diet, fasting, and the temple. But Gujarat in the late nineteenth century was thick with Jain influence, and the boy absorbed it as a kind of moral atmosphere: the Jain insistence that ahimsa, non-harm to every living thing, is the first of all duties; the practices of fasting and vowing; the Jain doctrine of anekāntavāda, that truth has many sides and no single standpoint exhausts it. The vegetarianism he later defended on principle, the willingness to hold several apparently conflicting truths at once, and the conviction that non-violence was not abstention but the most active force a person could wield — all of this had roots in the religious world of Jainism as much as in the Hinduism of his own household. His mother Putlibai’s fasts left a deeper mark on him than any scripture; he would say that he learned penance by watching her keep it.

The London years and a Gita read in English

He met his own tradition’s central text by a roundabout route. Married at thirteen, barely literate in Sanskrit, he sailed for London in 1888 to study law, having sworn vows to his mother — no meat, no wine, no women — that governed his anxious first years in England. There, in 1889, two members of the Theosophical Society sought him out: Bertram Keightley and his nephew Archibald Keightley, both of Helena Blavatsky’s inner circle. Gandhi, in his autobiography, calls them simply “the two brothers,” though they were uncle and nephew. They were reading the Bhagavad Gita and wanted a Sanskrit-knowing Indian to read it with them; Gandhi, to his shame, had never read it and knew it only in English. They read it together in Edwin Arnold’s verse translation, The Song Celestial (1885) — the Gita rendered into late-Victorian blank verse, the war between the cousins on the field of Kurukshetra recast, in the Theosophical reading the Keightleys carried, as an allegory of the war inside every soul. It was, by his own account, his first reading of the poem he would consult for the rest of his life, and he judged Arnold’s the best of the English renderings. The same circle gave him Arnold’s The Light of Asia, the verse life of the Buddha, and brought him into the orbit of Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant — he met them at the Blavatsky Lodge late in 1889, was pressed to join, and declined formal membership.

He never became a Theosophist, and he later kept a careful distance from the Society’s machinery at Adyar. But the encounter did something he repeatedly acknowledged: it sent him back to his own religion with new seriousness, and it fixed in him at the outset the allegorical reading of the Gita he would hold for life — that the battle it describes is not a historical war but the duel perpetually waged in the human heart, and that its core teaching is anāsakti, action without attachment to its fruits. That reading he would eventually publish as his own Gujarati commentary, Anāsakti-yoga (1929). The Gita that became the anchor of his inner life reached him, then, through an English poet and a pair of London esotericists — a transmission as roundabout as any in the modern history of Hindu scripture.

South Africa: satyagraha forged on religious ground

Satyagraha was forged in South Africa, where Gandhi worked from 1893 to 1914. He went out as a junior barrister on a one-year contract and stayed two decades, transformed by the daily indignities of colonial racial law into an organizer of the Indian community against it. The method he built there was not, at root, a calculation about what would move a colonial administration; it was a religious discipline applied to politics. He coined the word satyagraha — from satya, truth, and āgraha, firm holding — deliberately to displace the English phrase “passive resistance,” which he thought weak and negative, suggesting the weapon of those who lacked force. What he meant was the opposite: an active, demanding power, the force that is born of truth and love, exerted by refusing both to obey injustice and to answer it with violence. The campaigns against the registration of Indians and the poll tax, the marches and the mass imprisonments, were its first laboratory.

His counselors in those years were a characteristic mixture, none of them Hindu in any narrow sense. The Jain jeweler-poet Shrimad Rajchandra — Raychandbhai — was the nearest figure he ever acknowledged to a guru: a mystic and merchant of Bombay whose grasp of religious questions steadied Gandhi at a moment, early in South Africa, when Christian and Muslim friends were each pressing him to convert. Rajchandra’s counsel — that Hinduism, rightly understood, held what Gandhi was seeking, and that no religion held a monopoly on truth — kept him within his own tradition while opening it. Leo Tolstoy was the second great influence. Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, with its case for a Christianity of literal non-resistance, overwhelmed Gandhi when he read it; the two corresponded in the last year of the Russian writer’s life, and Gandhi named a cooperative settlement near Johannesburg Tolstoy Farm. The third was the Englishman John Ruskin, whose Unto This Last Gandhi read on a train and translated into Gujarati, drawing from it his commitment to manual labor and the dignity of the laborer. Out of this confluence — Jain ahimsa, the Gita’s anāsakti, Tolstoyan Christian non-resistance, Ruskinian labor — and not out of any single scripture, satyagraha took its shape.

The discipline of vows

His religion became, increasingly, a discipline of vows kept under public scrutiny. Truth and ahimsa he held as the two faces of one commitment. Brahmacharya — celibacy — he took as a permanent vow in 1906, in South Africa, at the age of thirty-six, understanding it not as mere abstinence but as the conservation and redirection of vital energy toward service, a yogic discipline of the body in the service of the soul; the vow reshaped his marriage and household for the rest of his life. Aparigraha — non-possession, the deliberate paring-away of property and want — he likewise held as a vow, living in ashrams, spinning his own cloth, reducing his possessions to a few objects. Fasting he used in two registers at once: as penance, the taking onto his own body of the failures of those around him, and as instrument — the public fast “unto death” that became, in the independence struggle and in the communal violence of partition, his most formidable and most criticized weapon. His daily prayer meetings drew on the scriptures of several faiths at once, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, the Ramdhun and the hymn Vaishnava Jana To sung beside readings from the Quran and the Sermon on the Mount; the multi-faith service was itself a statement of his conviction that the religions are so many roads up one mountain.

He attributed certain of his decisions — including some of his greatest fasts — to an inner voice, an antaryāmin or indwelling guide that he said spoke with an authority he could not disobey. The claim troubled even his admirers, who suspected self-deception or strategy in the timing; Gandhi declined to soften it, insisting the voice was as real to him as any sense perception and as little subject to argument. He reported no visions and claimed no occult powers; what he claimed was obedience.

”Truth is God”

In his later years he performed a quiet inversion that gathered up his whole theology into a phrase. His early formula had been God is Truth — the familiar devotional affirmation that the divine is the real. He turned it around: Truth is God. The reversal was deliberate and, to him, decisive. To say God is Truth leaves God as the subject, available to those who already believe; to say Truth is God makes truth the absolute and locates the divine wherever truth is honestly sought — so that the atheist who serves truth serves God, named or not, and the search for truth becomes itself the highest worship. It was, in its way, the most ecumenical sentence he ever uttered, and it placed satya — truth — at the center of a reformed Hinduism in which conduct, not creed, was the test of religion.

His autobiography, written in Gujarati and serialized in the 1920s, he titled The Story of My Experiments with Truth — not “my life,” not “my philosophy,” but his experiments, as though the religious life were a laboratory and its claims to be verified only in conduct. The word was exact. What he offered was not a system to be believed but a method to be tested: that religious truth is proven in action or not at all, and that the proof is borne on the body of the one who tests it.

Within the lineage of Hindu reform

Gandhi belongs to a line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hindu reformers who read their tradition through the pressure of the modern world and the encounter with Christianity, and who insisted that its ethical core could be recovered from ritual encrustation. The line runs back to Rammohan Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who in the early nineteenth century had argued for a rational, ethical, image-free monotheism drawn from the Upanishads and had campaigned against the social cruelties he found defended in the name of religion. Gandhi was not a Brahmo, and his sensibility was more devotional, more rooted in the Gita and in popular Vaishnava practice, than the Brahmo intellectualism. But he shared the reformers’ conviction that Hinduism stood or fell by its ethics, that untouchability was a corruption to be uprooted from within — he renamed the so-called untouchables Harijans, “people of God” — and that the religious inheritance was to be tested against conscience, not merely received. His own contribution to that lineage was to take the discipline out of the study and the temple and onto the road: to make of ahimsa and satya not doctrines but practices, and of the practitioner’s own suffering body the instrument by which the truth of a tradition might be demonstrated to those who did not share it. The vocabulary of yoga — karma-yoga, the discipline of selfless action; brahmacharya, the conduct of one bound for brahman — he carried over into a public, political life, so that the ashram and the campaign were continuous, the spinning wheel and the march both sadhana.

Sources and scholarship

The indispensable primary text is Gandhi’s own An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, written in Gujarati (1925–1929) and translated into English by his secretary Mahadev Desai; the London encounter with the Keightleys and Arnold’s Song Celestial is told in Part I, chapter 20. It sits within the vast Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, the hundred-volume government edition that remains the standard archive of his speeches, letters, and writings. The decisive modern study of his religious formation, and in particular of the Theosophical channel through which he first met the Gita, is Michael Bergunder’s “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (2014): 398–426 — which corrects the familiar potted version (the “two brothers” were Bertram and Archibald Keightley, uncle and nephew, of Blavatsky’s inner group) and reads Gandhi’s own self-description, experiments with truth, against the Theosophical and global-esoteric currents that ran through his early life. For the textual history of the Gita in English and Arnold’s central place in its modern reception — the line that runs straight to Gandhi — Richard H. Davis, The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2015), is the standard account. The principal scholarly biographies are Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (Yale University Press, 1989), and Ramachandra Guha’s two volumes, Gandhi Before India (2013) and Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World (2018), which together trace the South African forging of satyagraha and the Indian campaigns in close documentary detail. Arnold’s The Song Celestial — the Gita as Gandhi first read it — and The Light of Asia are both held in the Library.

There is a small irony in the title that history attached to him. In the Theosophy of his London years, “Mahatma” named the hidden adepts said to dwell in the Himalayas — the Masters whose letters founded a movement — an entirely different sense from the Indian honorific, which is far older and owes nothing to it; he was never, in any sense, a Theosophical Mahatma. The word that the crowds gave him meant only what it had always meant in Gujarati and Sanskrit: great soul. He was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist on 30 January 1948, on his way to evening prayers.

→ In the library: Arnold — The Song Celestial (1885), the Gita as Gandhi first read it · Arnold — The Light of Asia (1879)

→ Related: Theosophy · Rammohan Roy · Bhagavad Gita · Kingdom Of God · Edwin Arnold · Jainism · Hinduism · Yoga · Brahmo Samaj · Helena Blavatsky · Adyar