By Jim Phillips
January 30 will mark the anniversary of the assassination of one of humanity’s great teachers of nonviolence. At this difficult time in our country and in the world, there is strength in remembering who he was and what he showed us. Many called him Mahatma (Great Soul).
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born October 2, 1869, in British colonial India. He earned a law degree in England, spent years as a lawyer defending Indian clients in South Africa, and finally returned to India in the early 1900s. He became head of the Indian National Congress in 1921.
At the time, India was under a restrictive British colonial rule. There was tension and sometimes violence between Hindus and Muslims, the two largest religious blocks. Women were controlled from birth by men. Untouchables were those who were consigned by custom, religious belief, and law to do the most menial jobs and to live in poverty—the throw-aways of Indian society. The Congress was an activist organization dedicated to ending or lessening poverty, increasing the equality and rights of women, promoting religious and ethnic harmony, eliminating the category of “untouchables” in Indian society, and especially working for Indian self-rule (hind swaraj).
Eventually, Gandhi discarded his British lifestyle and adopted the clothing, diet, and lifestyle of traditional Indian peasant communities. He began what he called his “experiments with truth.” He practiced abstinence—fasting from food periodically and practicing chastity, although he was married. He later felt that he had been selfish in failing to consider how all this might have affected his wife, Kasturbai. Gandhi reflected on all of this in his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Abstinence became for Gandhi both a spiritual discipline and a political statement that challenged the violence that accompanies the acquisition of wealth, goods, or power.
By the 1930s, Gandhi was a leader in what was known as satyagraha, a concept difficult to define easily in English. It was manifest as campaigns of nonviolent civil disobedience and non-cooperation. Nonviolent civil protest might include not trying to defend one’s body when attacked by British colonial military or their Indian police subordinates. Gandhi and other satyagrahi believed that a nonviolent response to extreme violence could touch the conscience of those engaged in violent repression—especially those who were the front line servants of a repressive system—police, soldiers, government agents—without whom oppressive rule could not be enforced. Civil disobedience is not necessarily everyone’s path.
Non-cooperation or non-participation in evil or repressive systems became a foundational principle—not just a tactic—of nonviolent action. Gandhi led several major campaigns that became emblematic of non-cooperation with or withdrawal of support from British colonial rule. Most famous was the Great Salt March. The British colonial government demanded that Indians pay a tax on the salt they bought, a tax that helped fund Britain’s colonial rule over India. To enforce this, the colonial authorities made it illegal for ordinary Indians to make or gather salt. In 1930, Gandhi led thousands of people in a 250 mile walk to the sea where he and some of the marchers gathered sea salt, deliberately breaking what they saw as an unjust law, and withdrawing their support for colonial rule by evading the salt tax. Gandhi and many others were beaten and arrested, and he said he regretted that many who followed him suffered such violence.
Gandhi also led a campaign to stop buying British textiles, and instead to make cotton clothing in home and community workshops. Gandhi began making his own cotton cloth on a home spinning wheel. He said that his time at his spinning wheel each day was part of his practice of nonviolence. Cotton was grown in India and the clothing was lighter, more traditionally Indian, more suitable to a warm climate, and did not depend on British imports. It did not escape notice that spinning, by social norm and tradition, was considered work for women, and that Gandhi was deliberately violating that gendered division of labor.
When Gandhi realized that this boycott of British cloth affected the incomes and jobs of sheep herders and textile workers in northern England, he went to England and spent days among the textile workers explaining the struggle of Indians for self-government and how non-cooperation was necessary. For Gandhi, nonviolent actions must be mindful and not inflict even unintended violence to others. Consequences matter. This was, and remains, a difficult requirement.
In the 1940s, during World War 2, Britain relied on its British-trained Indian soldiers to fight against Japanese forces in southeast Asia, even as an independence movement was growing in India. After the war, Britain had little choice but to agree to Indian independence, which began in 1947. But independence also encouraged two opposed movements. Many in India’s large Muslim minority demanded an independent Muslim state separate from India. On the other side, an extremist Hindu nationalist movement developed that demanded Hindu dominance and the expulsion of Muslims.
Gandhi’s vision was always of a pluralistic and inclusive India. He led the nonviolent movement against the partition of India and for a tolerant and open society. Despite this movement, partition did occur. Parts of India, were carved out as the new Muslim nation of Pakistan. Chaos, religious violence, and slaughter accompanied this, as hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Hindus moved in opposite directions, Muslims toward Pakistan, Hindus out of those areas, passing and often attacking and killing each other in the process The carnage became an international spectacle.
Gandhi continued to lead prayer meetings through this disaster. Before one of these meetings, on January 30, 1948, he was assassinated by a young man described as a Hindu nationalist who believed Gandhi’s inclusive vision was treason to Hindus and India. By chance or intent, the nationalist movement to which the assassin belonged had adopted an ancient Hindu symbol that the Nazis had adapted to form the swastika.
A devout Hindu, Gandhi read the Christian Gospels and wrote that Jesus’ sermon on the mount “went straight to my heart.” It commanded us to love our enemies, do good to all, not covet earthly wealth. We know that Gandhi’s life and example influenced many famous people—Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, many others. Ordinary people around the world, including my Polish grandfather, also found inspiration in Gandhi’s life. The flag of modern India has the figure of a spinning wheel, a reminder of Gandhi’s teaching of simplicity, self-reliance, now interpreted also as national sovereignty.
Across years, distance, and differences, we can see the ugly similarities between Gandhi’s situation and our own—religious nationalism, empire, rampant racism, untouchable or throw-away people, violent greed, might makes right, extreme patriarchy, and more.
When I was a Jesuit seminarian in the 1960s, I found and read Gandhi’s autobiography and a collection of his other writings in our library. A lifetime of seeing nonviolent resistance by people in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States has given me my own understanding of what Gandhi meant, and a few simple beliefs.
Nonviolence is a way of life, not just an occasional tactic. Nonviolence may be a way of appealing to the conscience of others, but it is first of all for oneself. Each person’s practice of nonviolence is unique. We are all compromised in some ways by the realities of our world and our place and time. We each live nonviolence as best we can. We cannot afford to be “purists” about the practice of nonviolence for ourselves or others.
The core of Gandhi’s nonviolence was his understanding of truth. For Gandhi, truth was grounded in the realization of the unity and sacredness of everything (ahimsa). We are all one. Truth was factual—a sense of how our actions affect others— but it was more.than that. The search for truth is a humble path. We do not seek truth to exercise power over others but to clarify human relationships. The search for truth is difficult and constant. Today more than ever, this search for truth must contend with a multiplicity of false narratives, images, and idols.
The opposite of nonviolence is fear. In its extreme form, fear may become cowardice or clinging to false justifications for doing nothing. Fear is a terrible violence that is used to control others. However we live our nonviolence, and whatever we do, in the face of injustice or oppression we must do something. We cannot do nothing out of fear or indifference. Those who use fear as a weapon are most often themselves afraid.
Nonviolence is not a solitary choice but is always a community affair. Community is a powerful manifestation of nonviolence and an antidote to fear. The essence of nonviolence. is the realization—the truth—that whatever happens to one affects all.
I can write this, and we may already have reflected on all of it many times, but knowing what it means and how to adapt and live it in this time and place is an ongoing experiment. Thank you, Mr. Gandhi and all our ancestors and predecessors who have shown us by your lives the search for truth and the power of nonviolence, each in your own way.
James Phillips is an anthropologist, a former Jesuit, and a member of the Peace House Board. He has studied and participated in movements of social change and human rights in Latin America and the U.S. over several decades.
