标题: 1922.7 圣雄甘地 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-8-23 23:20 标题: 1922.7 圣雄甘地 GLOBAL
Mahatma Gandhi
"Gandhi has awakened the national consciousness in a way that no other man could awaken it; at the same time, he has unloosed forces that he is unable to control."
By Edmund Candler
George Rinhart / Corbis / Getty
JULY 1922 ISSUE
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I
To the Western mind, uninitiated in the Hindu religion or Indian politics, the title Mahatma has, until quite recently, carried with it a spiritualistic significance. Mahatmas appear at séances—or they did in Madame Blavatsky's time; and it was rightly concluded that their occult powers were acquired by the practice of an asceticism understood only in the East. One met mahatmas at Benares and Buddh Gaya, but one did not associate them with politics. Exactly when Mr. Gandhi became Mahatma Gandhi, it is difficult to say, for mahatmahood is not conferred on one after passing an examination; the word implies saintliness, and is the spontaneous tribute of a nation. Officially, I understand, this inconvenient saint, or politician, is still Mr. Gandhi.
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Probably there is no figure in contemporary history who means so many different things to so many different people. To the incurious Westerner, the name of Gandhi calls up the picture of a saint, or a charlatan, art ascetic, fanatic, or freak. If he reads many newspapers, the Mahatma will appear in turn as patriot, martyr, high-souled idealist, and arch-traitor; evangelist, pacific quietist, and truculent tub-thumper and revolutionist; subverter of empires and founder of creeds, a man of tortuous wiles and stratagems, or, to use his own phrase, 'a single-minded seeker after truth'; generally, in the eyes of the tolerant who are without prejudice, a well-meaning but misguided politician. Certainly a complex figure. Probably very few, even of the Anglo-Indian community on whom his personality impinges directly, a very substantial incubus, have made up their minds which of these things he is.
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It calls for more than a little sympathetic imagination in an official of the dominant race, to recognize the good points in a rebel. Nevertheless, Gandhi's honesty of purpose has been generally admitted by the Indian Government, by the Viceroy, as well as by the Secretary of State. The rage of a certain section of the British press with Mr. Montagu, when he admitted that Mahatma Gandhi was his friend, is understandable.
It was not easy, even for the Englishman in India, who knew something of the undercurrents of Indian politics and of the personalities who pulled the strings, to believe in his sincerity. To the man in the street, of course, the Mahatma was the incendiary, with the torch in his hand, and his gospel of nonviolence a not very ingenuous formula to protect his person while he applied the spark to the train that was to blow up the citadel. He inflamed the passions of the mob and invoked forbearance; to the ordinary Western mind these were the tactics of an arch-humbug. Did he really believe that the unlettered hordes in whom he instilled this festering race-hatred would submit tamely to their real or imagined wrongs? Even if he were an honest visionary in this, Christian Europe could only be shocked at the picture of 315,000,000 people constrained by the Mahatma's soul-force into the posture, enjoined by the Gospels, of turning the other cheek.
When I met Mr. Gandhi, I suggested that it was idle to stir up violence in the heart and to forbid violence by the hand. But he regarded me pityingly, as a materialist groping in the outer darkness yet with the embracing sympathy which he extends to all creatures. He believed that it was possible—possible in the spiritual East. And I knew that he was sincere.
In visualizing leaders of men, one illogically expects to find the alphabet of power or grace written in capital letters over their features. Gandhi bore no inscription. He looked as if he might quite possibly be a saint; he might equally well be a politician. I thought of him in the midst of ecstatic millions, and remembered hearing that he had only to lift his hand if he needed quiet, and the uproar of excitement that followed him everywhere would die away like the rustle of wind in the trees. I looked for the imprint of this forcefulness: it was not there. I understand now that the Mahatma's sway over the common people proceeds from no direct influence, but from rumor and the magnification on all men's lips of his saintliness.
II
In the West the man who is acclaimed a hero in his lifetime is generally a man of action, probably a general or a capitalist; holy men are, or used to be, canonized only after their death. But in the East, where spirituality is the standard, the mahatma is king. The masses, only in a less degree than the intelligentsia, are hero-worshipers. To their seeing, the physical frame of the elect, though it be a mere shell, is divinely charged when yet on the horizon, and they are prepared to prostrate themselves before him. If he be lean or fat, tall or short, such is divinity.
But there was nothing in Gandhi's appearance to discount his saintliness. He rose from the floor to receive me—a spare figure, enveloped in homespun blankets; a man of middle age, or so he appeared, bareheaded, with strong, close-cropped iron-gray hair, without the bodi, or Hindu tuft; very large ears, pierced in the centre of the lobe,—the punctures for earrings?—the only physical relic of vanity, if it had ever existed; the chin fine and clean-shaven expression alert, eyes penetrating, glance direct. He greeted me with gentle courtesy. His English idiom and accent were perfect. When I was seated, he subsided into his blankets again. He was not in the least voluble. His inclination was to give me the lead.
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I had been drawn into controversy with him in the press,—or he with me,—and we had exchanged several open letters. The point at issue was the Khalifat question. If it was hard to believe that the Apostle of Peace was innocent of the incitement to carnage, the association of the Mahatma with the Khalifat party1 was still more difficult to explain away. The inveterate cleavage between the Mohammedans and Hindus has always been recognized barrier by Indian patriots as the main barrier to the attainment of swaraj.2 The politician who could unite these incompatible currents in a combined stream would have won half the battle of independence. Thus the Hindu-Moslem Entente, from the Indian point of view, is the most important political movement of the century.
When, on November 24, 1919, the Hindu, Swami Shradhanand, ascended the pulpit of the Jama Masjid, at Delhi, and addressed the people, the precedent was described in the Mohammedan press in India as the most remarkable event in recent Islamic history. Then in December Gandhi was elected President of the Khalifat Conference at Delhi. It was about this time that the political catchword, 'Allahu Akbar and Om (the mystic Hindu formula) are one name,' began to be repeated everywhere, and the Mussulmans, to appease Hindu sentiment, forsook the slaying of kine. This was only the beginning of Gandhi's association with the Moslem extremists. At a later stage he became so far the champion of Islam as to make civil obedience to the Government of India contingent upon the rectification of the Treaty of Sèvres. Gandhi, of course, was morally entitled to throw his whole force into the Islamic movement so long as his belief in the righteousness of the Turk's cause was sincere. To his critics, however, he appeared to be backing a cause which he must know to be wrong, out of political expediency.
What conceivable traffic can there be between the apostle of gentleness,—the liberator of his own people,—and the truculent Turk, that he should join in a campaign to perpetuate a régime of repression like the Osmanli's? But Gandhi was quite frank about his position. He did not pretend to be interested in the Turk. As for the subject races, he still believed, in spite of the Turk's record of massacre-made majorities, that Christians, Arabs, and Jews might enjoy their birthright and remain autonomous within the Ottoman Empire, under the protection of guaranties. 'By helping the Mohammedans of India,' he said, 'at a critical moment of their history, I want to buy their friendship.' And so long as he believed in their wrongs, it was a perfectly straight deal. The Hindu-Moslem Entente was the first essential in Indian nationalism.
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III
I must confess that I never entirely believed in Mr. Gandhi until I met him. His punctilios I was inclined to put down to sophistry, though I was ready to believe that he was more honest than most politicians. If I had followed his career more closely, I should have been less skeptical; but the splendid fight he put up for his countrymen in South Africa in his campaign of passive resistance, and the true facts as to his sincerity, consistency, and courage in it, had come to me only in the shape of rumor. I smiled at first when he blandly explained that he had no wish to embarrass Government, but that 'sometimes one's right conduct does embarrass those who do not for the moment, appreciate it.' So, 'in the relentless pursuit of truth and in the conduct flowing from it,' he had, like other reformers, embarrassed those dearest to him, but he was 'no more anti-British than anti-dear-ones.' 'My stubborn opposition to certain acts of the British Government must not be taken for unfriendliness.'
From an Englishman this might have savored a little of cant; but Gandhi in his unselfconscious detachment is transparently devoid of pride or affectation. I could believe him when he told me that he had a host of English friends. The thing which more than anything else separates the Mahatma from other Indian extremist leaders is that he has the courage to stand up in a great assembly and utter unpalatable truths. He does not flatter his own people; the herd follow him because they recognize that he is without moral or physical fear.
In one of his speeches he reminded his countrymen that they were offering battle to a nation which is 'saturated' with the spirit of sacrifice whenever the occasion arises. He asked them to go through the sacrifice that 'the men, women, and brave lads of England went through.' Indians, believe him now when he tells them that Government is material and godless, and that it is sinful to associate with it, because two years ago, when he still had faith in the Reforms, he had dared to say creditable things about it.
'I do not blame the British,' Gandhi said. 'If we were weak in numbers, as they are, we too would perhaps have resorted to the methods which they are now employing. Terrorism and deception are weapons, not of the strong, but of the weak. The British are weak in numbers; we are weak in spite of numbers. The result is that each is dragging the other down.'
A few years earlier, in December, 1914, Gandhi declared that it was his dream and hope that the connection between India and England might be a source of spiritual comfort and uplift to the whole world. He was convinced that, whatever might be the motives of the British rulers in India, there was a desire on the part of the nation at large to see that justice is done.
Until the year 1920 Gandhi was a consistent loyalist. In the Boer War, in spite of his treatment by the Colonials he formed and led an Indian Ambulance Corps. In the Zulu Rebellion he again volunteered, and was given the command of a Bearer Corps, with the rank of Sergeant-Major. Then, in the Great War, in December, 1914, he raised the Indian Ambulance Corps in England, and would have served in it but for his broken health. This is a remarkable record for a rebel.
To follow the phases of disaffection in the Mahatma during the last two years would make too long a story; the point to remark is that Gandhi's growing intolerance of British rule, and his discovery of the satanic nature of Government, have synchronized with the development of the reform scheme by which India is to attain, by progressive stages, complete self-government within the British Empire.
The stages may be too slow for Mr. Gandhi's liking, but the Indian Parliament or Legislative Assembly, with its large nonofficial, popularly elected majority, has been in existence now for more than a year, and there was nothing to prevent the extremists capturing the polls at the last election and working or wrecking the machine from within. It is open to them to do so constitutionally in two years' time, instead of boycotting the reforms.
The virtual supremacy of the Legislative Assembly is already established, in spite of official safeguards in the form of checks and vetoes which, as might have been foreseen, are never likely to be applied. Whatever the new Councils decide, Government will pass as law. The Indian legislators have the power to repeal any act they like and to complete the Indianization of the administration. They have got swaraj; only they will not see it.
To Mahatma Gandhi and his irreconcilables, liberty is not to be accepted as a gift: it is the birthright of the people. 'Councils are no factories to make stout hearts, and freedom is miasma without stout hearts to defend it.' To Mahatma Gandhi the Reforms are only a subtler method of emasculation. In his fanatical passion for sacrifice and self-purification, he refuses all association with the satanic Government. How is it, the stranger will ask, that a government which appears to be dealing out liberty with both hands has suddenly become, the eyes of the Mahatma, satanic? It is a question that is being answered every day in India, in no indefinite terms, wherever two or three are gathered together. Gandhi never tired of proclaiming the offense from the housetops until the prison doors closed on him.
Two things have inflamed his countrymen—'the Punjab wrongs, and the breach of faith against the Mohammedans.' Until Government repaired the breach and repented of the wrong, Gandhi declared a fight to the finish. He pledged himself to preach disaffection openly and systematically until it pleased Government to arrest him.
IV
Unfortunately for Englishmen and Indians, the Punjab wrongs and the Khalifat grievance are two mountains which neither faith nor penitence can remove. The wrong in the case of the Punjab, the massacre at the Jallianwala Bagh, the crawling order that was issued at Amritsar, and other humiliations upon Indians, is irretrievable. The blot, too, on our good name is irretrievable. These actions have been condemned and repudiated by Government, though too lightly. Nor has the onus of official displeasure fallen heavily enough upon the offenders. Nevertheless, it is obviously impossible for any government to revise the scale of punishment two years after judgment has been passed in response to popular clamor.
As to the alleged breach of faith in connection with the Khalifat, the threat to England that, if, the status quo ante bellum were not restored to Turkey by the Allied Powers, she would forfeit her claim to the Mohammedans' allegiance, is, on the face of it, preposterous. Even if England were the sole arbiter of the destiny of Turkey, the interference of Indian agitators could not be tolerated.
But we do not believe in this alleged breach of faith—the assurance to Mohammedan India, in order to appease Moslem soldiers, of the integrity of Turkey after the war. The truth is that millions of Indians were sore about the Khalifat, and the political exploitation of religious sentiment was an opportunity not to be lost.
The brothers Mahomed and Shaukat Ali maintained that Islam would be divested of all its dignity and glamour and prestige by the fall of its spiritual head. Turkey was the last stronghold. Every other Moslem kingdom had been swallowed up by the rapacious Christian Powers. To present England as the enemy of Turkey and Islam, thereby giving a religious color to a political agitation, was their trump card.
Gandhi, I believe, that champion of wronged peoples and lost causes, was captured by the fanatical leaders of the Khalifat movement, the plausible Ali brothers, and persuaded of a dark conspiracy to destroy the spiritual forces of Islam. That he believed in the justice of the cause of his Mohammedan allies there can be no doubt; and it calls for little imagination to understand with what bitter humiliation the Punjab wrongs have troubled his spirit. Yet I cannot think that Gandhi has repudiated his allegiance beyond compromise on these two counts alone; that, because of them, he prefers anarchy to association with, the British in attainment of swaraj. Doubtless, the Mahatma has persuaded himself that this is so, in spite of the long-drawn patience and conciliation of the Government; but the estrangement goes deeper than that. I do not believe that, if any god out of the machine could arise, to resettle the Turkish peace terms in such a way as to leave the Khalifatists no grievance at all, and to prove that there had been no massacre in the Jallianwala Bagh, or crawling order, and that the Punjab wrongs were an ugly dream, the irreconcilables would be reconciled to any scheme of self-government which did not involve complete dissociation from the exploiting foreigner.
It ought to be perfectly easy for us in the West to see the Indian's point of view. But we are singularly lacking in imagination. It is a matter of shame to Gandhi and his irreconcilables that a hundred thousand foreigners should rule and exploit three hundred and fifteen million Indians, emasculating them, indoctrinating them with the spirit of materialism and a sense of their racial unfitness. So it appears to the Mahatma. He has learned to distrust the British and the gifts they bring. He hopes to wean England from the downward path she is treading. Salvation can come only from within.
V
But to return to the discussion of Gandhi's sincerity, which, after all, is the vital question.
Gandhi's spirituality has been discounted, on the ground that he is a politician. Yet every seer or founder of a creed, or system, has been a politician. Gandhi, has his own answer to these imputations on his good faith. 'Jesus,' he said, 'in my humble opinion, was a prince among politicians. He did render unto Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's. The politics of his time consisted in securing the welfare of the people by teaching them not to be seduced by the trinkets of the priests and Pharisees.'
Gandhi argues that the system of government is so devised as to affect every department of the national life. 'If, therefore, we want to conserve the welfare of the nation, we must religiously interest ourselves in the doings of the governors and exert a moral influence on them by insisting on their obeying the laws of morality.'
Gandhi regards himself, not only as a national leader, but as a missionary of civilization to the West. Not that he tilts at Western culture; he draws his gospel from Tolstoy, and is only less indebted to Ruskin and Thoreau than to the Bhagavadgita and the Sermon on the Mount. It is modern civilization that he abhors—the curse of industrialism, the hurry and drive of mercantile competition, the multiplication of luxuries, our gross material activities destroying simplicity, killing the ideal. Mills, factories, telegraphs, motor cars, railways, though he uses them and admits his inconsistency, are his abomination. He believes that economic progress is antagonistic to real progress, and that India may again become the religious teacher and spiritual guide of the West.
The pathetic thing about the racial issue in India is that each party is trying to elevate the other. It is a duel in altruism. While the British regard the uplift of India's backward millions as a sacred trust, Mahatma Gandhi hopes to conquer the greed and cruelty of the West by soul-force. 'The moment the Englishmen feel that, although they are in India in a hopeless minority, their lives are protected against harm, not because of the matchless weapons of destruction which are at their disposal, but because Indians refuse to take the lives, even of those whom they may consider to be utterly in the wrong, that moment will see a transformation in the English nature in its relation to India, and that moment will also be the moment when all the destructive cutlery that is to be had in India will begin to rust.'
And Mr. Gandhi's faith in the civilizing power of soul-force is so great that, when the timid draw a picture of India overrun with warlike frontier tribes on the departure of the British, he is still confident. 'If India returns to her spirituality,' he says, 'it will react upon the neighboring tribes. She will interest herself in the welfare of these hardy but poor people, and even support them if necessary, not out of fear, but as a matter of neighborly duty.'
Probably no utterance of Gandhi has put him so far outside the pale of practical politics as that. The Mahatma appears insincere to the unimaginative, because he believes that things which ought to be are, or can be. It might be said that he has pursued, almost to the point of unscrupulousness, the intensive cultivation of his optimism as to the efficacy of goodness. Thus he has taught himself to believe that soul-force can turn the knife of the Pathan, change the heart of the Turk toward his subject-races, and so gentle the brute in man that angry hordes, inflamed with the sense of injury, will bottle up their passions and win a peaceful victory over their oppressors, not by violence, but by self-purifications. If it is insincerity to have made himself like that, when it was open to him to recognize the inhibitions that hedge about our earthly Utopias, then he is so far insincere. But his is an insincerity that will never lack admirers.
There is no room for expediency or fear or half-measures in his gospel. 'Cut yourself off from the evil in disregard of all consequences. Have faith in a good deed, that it will produce a good result. Be prepared to lose all, and you will gain everything.' That in Gandhi's opinion is the Gita doctrine of work without attachment.
VI
The Mahatma has sadly disappointed the masses. His superhumanity now is open to suspicion. He may be bulletproof; nevertheless, he's in jail. And he has lost izzat,—the Indian word is much more expressive than our English 'prestige,'—because he failed to bring about swaraj in one year. This is perhaps unfair; for Mr. Gandhi swaddled his promise in conditions which, as any intelligent disciple could foresee, must have suffocated the germs of fulfillment from the start.
Swaraj could be established in one year, he said, if there were sufficient response from the nation: that is to say, if politicians would cease to stand at the Councils; if Government officials would give up their posts and titleholders their decorations, litigants forsake the law-courts, pleaders devote themselves to national service, and everyone abjure foreign cloth and cultivate organizing ability and the virtues of discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, self-control, confidence, and courage, and, what is more important, forbearance in the face of wrong; if the soldier could lay down his arms without violence, and the common man keep his hands off the officer who came to execute the law; if, in fact, his countrymen's baser human clay could be transmuted into mahatmahood, then India would have swaraj in a year.
But of all this the masses heard only, 'Swaraj in a year.' At the end of the year, the Mahatma told them that they had not been through enough suffering to learn to acquire control over themselves. The soul-force for mass civil disobedience was wanting. The response of the nation had been inadequate.
The Mahatma is now charged with misleading the ignorant masses with false promises. Certainly they were misled. But he told them no lies. In his simple idealism, he could have had no intention to deceive. The white heat of his fervor forbids such a calumny, and the iteration of that long, equally forbidding, conditional clause disproves it.
The intelligentsia, at any rate, cannot complain that they were misled. Three months after his noncoöperation scheme was promulgated, Gandhi repeated in Calcutta exactly what manner of discipline the ordeal imposed on them. His disciples had not bargained for these sacrifices.
Later, he enjoined abstinence to the point of celibacy. 'Being a nation of slaves, it is our duty at the present to suspend bringing heirs to our slavery.' And he instructed Indian parenthood as to the practical ways and means for the segregation of the sexes.
VII
It argues a blind instinct of hero-worship in the Indian that the word of this picturesque idealist, as he has been called by one of his own countrymen, should have become law. Mahatma Gandhi became a greater autocrat than the Viceroy. For a year or two he was the virtual dictator of the intelligentsia, and issued manifestoes and ultimatums to Government. While his noncoöperation propaganda was brewing, not one of the hard-headed nationalist leaders, many of them astute business men, dared openly defy his authority. There was more in it than personal magnetism and mahatmahood: Gandhi was indispensable. The saint who had captured the popular imagination was the one person to see the scheme through, not to its Utopian realization, of course, but to the 'preliminary' anarchical stage, in which the complete stoppage of the administration would paralyze Government and bring it to a standstill. So far—that is to say, if one left out pastoralism, idealism, spiritualism, the repentant lion couched beside the convincing lamb—the Mahatma's scheme was eminently practicable. And so far it commended itself to the majority of the revolutionaries.
The cynical, of course, are convinced that this is exactly how far Mahatma Gandhi intended it to go; while the more tolerant of his opponents regarded him as not so much a tactician, as a dupe. But the Mahatma was perfectly honest in his optimism, and believed that he was eminently practical. He even claimed that his proposition was based on a mathematical calculation. Swaraj he defined as 'a state in which we can maintain our separate existence without the presence of the English.' The Indians, he explained, had bound themselves with their own chains; it was easy to cast them off. No government could exist a day without the coöperation of the people. 'Dissociate yourselves from the satanic administration, and you will bring it to its knees. You will not have to lift a finger, let alone a stick or stone.'
In all his talk and speeches, Gandhi comes back to Ahimsa, the Hindu doctrine of the sinfulness of taking life. In his conversation with me, he was very earnest in his efforts to prove that his Satyagraha movement led to no bloodshed. He maintained that there had been no violence in the Punjab until we opened fire at Amritsar. His Mohammedan allies, he admits, believe in methods of violence; but he associates with them only so long as they pledge themselves to Ahimsa.
'As soon as India accepts the doctrine of the sword,' he said in Madras, 'my life as an Indian is finished'; and he repeated his threat that, if ever his country gave itself over to violence in the pursuit of liberty, he would retire as a penitent into the solitude of the Himalayan forests.
But the Mahatma has not gone to the Himalayas; he has chosen the prison-house instead, openly challenging Government to arrest him, and pledging himself to his campaign of disaffection to the end. Probably he thought that the picture of fetters and gyves in the minds of his disciples would better help the cause.
For a long time the policy of the Extremists has been one of provocation to intensive oppression. But the Government of India, in its well-meant efforts to disappoint them, hesitating to create an atmosphere unfavorable to the success of the Reforms, and hoping that the agitation would wear itself out, consumes itself in its own smoke; appears to have been almost as futile and pathetic in its trustfulness in human nature as Mahatma Gandhi himself. Its scruples, of course, were attributed to timidity or impotence.
As a result of the Khalifat agitation, India has had the Mopla rebellion, in which one heard of babies 'torn to pieces as if they were banana skins,' and old men hacked to death; as a result of the noncoöperation movement, the riots at Bombay and Madras during the Prince's visit, and the hideous outbreak at Chauri chaura, in which the wounded police were roasted alive.
Mahatma Gandhi in the meantime is becoming more and more intransigeant, more and more fanatical. The strain on his spirit is too great. His peculiar gentleness, in speech, at any rate, is not what it was. He appears, even to those among his political enemies who admire him, to be deteriorating. He is possessed by the demon of sacrifice; and in his reformer's vision, his eyes are cast beyond the Indian horizon. He sees the world purified by his gospel. 'England is to be conquered,' he says, 'by the shame of any further imposition of agony upon a people that loves its liberties more than life.'
But England believes that the only liberty she denies the Indian irreconcilable is the liberty of plunging his country into anarchy while she is handing over the reins of government. It is a subtle revenge to compel her to put good patriots into jail—a revenge which argues an understanding of Christian mentality quite in keeping with the Mahatma's optimism as to the inherent goodness in man.
For there is nothing more offensive to the Christian than the habit of turning toward him the other cheek. The left cheek, too, when the right has not been smitten—to the soldier this is a blow beneath the spiritual belt.
And it is most unfair to talk about patriots baring their breasts to bullets, when the men behind the rifles would give their lives to save the patriots from turning their motherland into another Russia.
Happily, or unhappily, the common man in the street does not understand Ahimsa or Satyagraha. To him this art of spilling one's own blood instead of spilling that of one's opponent seems to be only another way of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
Much wrong is done to the cause by Gandhi's disciples; for the spirit of the Mahatma does not dwell in their councils.
After the periodic outbreaks that occur in districts where the wrongs of the people have been explained to them by noncoöperators with counsels of forbearance, Gandhi has imposed upon himself long periods of fasting and penitence, which are duly proclaimed. He denounces the violent, calls upon them to offer expiation, admits that he has underrated the forces of evil, and prepares to give the doctrine of Ahimsa another trial.
Gandhi has awakened the national consciousness in a way that no other man could awaken it; at the same time, he has unloosed forces that he is unable to control. Let us hope that his fanaticism may not destroy what he has given.
It is not in reason or logic that we must look for the quality of the man. He is an incurable optimist, visionary, and dreamer, of the order of those who achieve great things because they have not got the logic in them to see that small things are impossible. Before the faith of such, mountains glide imperceptibly away, while the molehills that the worldly-wise and practical attack daily crop up again as soon as they are leveled by the rake.
But Gandhi has done nothing, it may be objected; his influence is waning; he is a spent force, a broken man, in prison; his gospel of noncoöperation is discredited. Exactly. He is the 'high man,' who, 'aiming at a million, misses a unit.'
But he has lighted a candle. Swaraj will not be attained by his scheme of progressive non-violent noncoöperation; nevertheless, because of his idealism, India is infinitely nearer swaraj. In Mahatma Gandhi the youth of the country have their own national hero now—a man to whom they can point, without moral or physical fear; like Garibaldi or Mazzini, only saintlier; a man whose spirit is unclouded by anger or envy or pride. When they listen to him, they feel that the Vedas and the Bhagavadgita are no legends. To them, Mahatma Gandhi embodies the essence of the selfless spirituality that is personified in their sacred books; he is the living incarnation of the spirit that once made their country great.
FOOTNOTES:
1. The party pledged to the maintenance of the temporal power of the Khalif.
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我曾在媒体上与他发生争论，或者说他与我发生争论，我们曾交换过几封公开信。争论的焦点是哈利法特问题。如果说很难相信和平使者在煽动屠杀方面是无辜的，那么圣雄与哈利法特党1的联系就更难解释了。印度爱国者一直认为穆罕默德人和印度人之间长期存在的分歧是阻碍实现 "大一统 "的主要障碍。因此，从印度人的角度来看，印度教-莫斯林协约是本世纪最重要的政治运动。
