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For instance, it is clear even from the autobiography that his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded.
In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed. Nobody ever suggested that he was corrupt, or ambitious in any vulgar way, or that anything he did was actuated by fear or malice. The British Conservatives only became really angry with him when, as in 1942, he was in effect turning his non-violence against a different conqueror.īut I could see even then that the British officials who spoke of him with a mixture of amusement and disapproval also genuinely liked and admired him, after a fashion. How reliable such calculations are in the long run is doubtful as Gandhi himself says, ‘in the end deceivers deceive only themselves’ but at any rate the gentleness with which he was nearly always handled was due partly to the feeling that he was useful. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away. The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. In private this was sometimes cynically admitted. Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy, but since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence - which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever - he could be regarded as ‘our man’. It was also apparent that the British were making use of him, or thought they were making use of him.
The things that one associated with him - home-spun cloth, ‘soul forces’ and vegetarianism - were unappealing, and his medievalist programme was obviously not viable in a backward, starving, overpopulated country. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time, did not. But this partial autobiography, which ends in the nineteen-twenties, is strong evidence in his favour, all the more because it covers what he would have called the unregenerate part of his life and reminds one that inside the saint, or near-saint, there was a very shrewd, able person who could, if he had chosen, have been a brilliant success as a lawyer, an administrator or perhaps even a businessman.Īt about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity - by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying-mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power - and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi’s acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant. Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. This material remains under copyright and is reproduced by kind permission of the Orwell Estate and Penguin Books.
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