GANDHI AT SEVENTY
By S. K. RATCLIFFE
INDIA will, or should be celebrating on Monday the seventieth birthday of her most famous son, for Mohundas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2nd, 1869. The adult life of this extraordinary man falls into three periods. Being called to the Bar in London at 21, after a three years' ordeal described with utter naiveté in his Autobiography, he tried to fulfil the family ambition by practising law in the little State of the Kathiawar peninsula, from which at that time no other member of his caste had ventured into the outside world. But he was smitten dumb as he stood up in court, felt miserably that he could never be an advocate, and went to South Africa on behalf of some Indian litigants. There he found his mission, as champion of the Indian settlers against the Transvaal Government ; and there he worked out successfully the method of non- violent civil disobedience upon which his world-renown was later established. This first stage, twenty years of agitating, ended in 1914 with the outbreak of war.
The Amritsar shooting in 1919 made a decisive opening for his second period. Within a few months Gandhi had become the dominant leader of Indian nationalism, despite the fact that his aims and practices had little in common with those of the Indian National Congress as then directed. He imposed upon the Congress party not only the principle of non-co-operation, but also his twin doctrines of Ahimsa and Satyagra ha (complett r on-violence and redemptive suffer- ing), together with the obligation of Khadz, the spinning- wheel. The unique crusade thus started, and marked by recurring waves of civil disobedience, covered fourteen years. It ended in 1933 with Gandhi's formal renunciation of his mass technique. The times and the political instincts of the Indian parties were too much for him. The Round Table Conferences had been held, and India was moving by long strides towards responsible self-government.
Gandhi himself had attended the second of those con- ferences, after months of vacillation and conflicting deci- sions. His presence at St. James's Palace gave delight to the newspapers of the world, but it was politically negligible. The astonishing fact about this apparition—a thing un- imaginable under any other Government than the British— was that it happened in the year after the imprisonment provoked by Gandhi's defiant Salt March from Gujerat to the sea—an adventure fantastic in plan and execution, in- volving hideous suffering for thousands of passive resisters, but unequalled as a publicity-device and confirming Gandhi's position as the adored dictator of India. The Mahatma (Great Soul, a title he afterwards repudiated) wielded, and still wields, a personal authority over the multitude which has never been approached.
It was the humdrum compromise on communal claims, following the Round Table he had attended, which led to the spectacular beginning of. his third and still unfinished period. During the past seven years, while keeping his hold upon the rank-and-file of the Congress movement, Gandhi has devoted himself to the millions of Untouchables in the Hindu system (Harijan, he calls them, children of God) —surely as noble a cause as ever in the long roll of humane service has commanded the energies of a man of genius. In 1932 he took a strictly individual stand upon the electoral claims of the depressed classes. Their political leaders were against him ; the issue was confused for all concerned. But that did not deter this man of implacable theory. In- sisting upon his own solution, he entered upon a coercive fast ; and on the seventh day the MacDonald Government, with the Indian leaders, reached a formula which brought release. Two other fasts, of equal length, stand as amazing proofs of his physical and spiritual hardihood. In 1924 he endured for twenty-one days, doing heroic penance for Hindu-Moslem violence ; and again in 1932, during three weeks in Yeravda gaol, not, as he explained, for any specific object, but in order to purge his movement of internal decay. He believes supremely in vicarious sacrifice.
Gandhi's record as a political leader is remarkably in- teresting and puzzling. From time to time he has ordered a retreat, announced a reversal of policy, or made confession of failure. He has dominated a movement of racial and national reconstruction from the standpoint of a non-believer in Government and administrative institutions. The men who shaped the Indian National Cohgress were politicians bred in the English school. They believed in constitutions and representative methods. They were interested in the forms of self-government, in office and the rewards of office, and like Tagore in a full exchange between East and West, Gandhi had been concerned with none of these things. Western statecraft, like Western science, is for him Satanic. His India is not mediaeval merely ; it is Vedic. He holds that the Indian who trades beyond his own district is false to an essential law of his being. If Indians had not forgotten that, their country would have been a land flowing with milk and honey: that is to say, a land of God's plenty, whose riches, according to this terrific ascetic, the Indian's religion forbade him to enjoy. Gandhi's politics are irnpos- sibilist, and his ethical code has no relation to the world of common men and women, in India or elsewhere. But he embodies a character and a will such as could not appear, in alliance with his spiritual doctrine, more than once in any age. His service to India can never be computed. His strange little physique is known to all the world. As a human being he is irresistible. His creed of non-violence, reaffirmed with his accustomed certainty as Europe once again plunged into war, is denied today, and with a weight of ferocity never before known. But who shall say that in the end there will be any other refuge for the spirit and life of man?
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