Mahatma Gandhi
A GREAT LIFE IN BRIEF
BY
Vincent Sheean
New
York
ALFRED
A.
KNOPF
1955
www.gandhimedia.org
L.
C
catalog card number: 54-7222
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK,
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
No
Copyright /jj^ by Vincent Sheean. All rights reserved.
part of this book may be reproduced in any form without per
mission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a
magazine or newspaper. Published simultaneously in Canada
Stewart Limited. Manufactured in the United
by McClelland
of America.
&
FIRST EDITION
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
I Before the Battle
3
II Discovery in South Africa
23
III Satyagraha
IV
V
India
and
49
War
Into Rebellion
VI The Salt March
VII
86
Sacrifice
113
to
152
Victory
and Fulfillment
195
201
Bibliography
Index
follows page
204
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MAHATMA GANDHI
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CHAPTER ONE
BEFORE THE BATTLE
GANDHI
S existence
from the beginning of the present
century was subjected to a more rigorous public attention than any other known to us.
Everything he said and
did was recorded and made public
immediately. His
pulse beat and his bowel movements were precisely
noted. He could not condone a sin without
assuming its
Once when he permitted a doctor to chloroform
a hopelessly sick calf, the whole of India was in turmoil.
he was unable to sleep, millions did not sleep;
guilt.
When
when he
fasted, millions fasted; his slow, gentle
were cut
into
wax and
disseminated
by
words
radio to half a
continent several times a day. He had the
unparalleled
misfortune to become a public saint in the twentieth cen
tury, canonized alive in the glare of flashlights and the
relentless gaze of cameras.
the most resolute atten
Only
tion to his immediate tasks, toilsome
him
He
to ignore the
world s
and endless, enabled
and keep on going.
and with immense diffi
fantasies
had
to cultivate,
deliberately
a
culty,
patience that was not originally in his nature, so
as to endure the environment of his
greatness. "The woes
of Mahatmas,"
he
3
said wryly,
"are
known
to
Mahatmas
alone/
Yet the myth arose and was a true myth, changing the
behavior of whole populations, altering the course of his
tory and the fate of empire.
to us in which
every fact
amounts
the
to
an unknown.
phenomenon
There
is
is
no other case known
known and
yet their
sum
We cannot satisfactorily explain
of Gandhi.
The
efforts
made by Pravda
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MAHATMA GANDHI
^
and by
the Philosophical
Review
in
Moscow, during
the
were the most absurd mani
year that followed his death,
festations of epigonic Marxomania that even those peri"
There is far more truth in a phrase
Lord Halifax once used in talking of Gandhi to me "He
was a good little man." The gentle and kindly Viceroy
odicals have exhibited.
:
the temper of his antagonist: they understood each
knew
other.
Goodness might be, of course, the key.
My own guess
The
only claim he
have lived the greater part
of his life (almost fifty years) in the most literal and exact
effort to
obey the teachings of the Bhagavad-Qita, to
which he assimilated the Sermon on the Mount. This
that the
is
ever
was
made
Mahatma thought
for himself
essentially
was
it
was.
to
an ethical preoccupation, not metaphysi
He wanted to be good, to
good life, and goodness was for him very much
associated and almost identical with innocence.
eat
cal;
he was not a philosopher.
live the
("I
he said to me. ) The regaining of
may seem a hopeless endeavor, and cer^
the Mahatma himself was troubled
by a sense of
in some respects. He was never
fully reconciled
only innocent
lost innocence
tainly
failure
food,"
to the idea of
drinking goat s milk, though it had become
a physical
had to overcome anger at times,
necessity.
at
other
the subjugation of lust was an
times;
impatience
a
as
difficult
as the Lord Buddha s
agony,
victory
He
subju"
gation of the wild elephant.
as they
appeared in his
the
system"
than his toward the end of his
just the
Gandhi myth.
imperfections
eyes, it is not easy to imagine
ethical nature was more
more harmoniously adjusted to the
Goodness,
his
own
any human being whose
atically controlled
Whatever
life,
or
instinctive
good.
same, cannot explain the power of
It is
beyond dispute
that his
person-
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
ality
mand.
is
5
commanded even when he
An
least desired to
com
identity of opposites haunts his entire story: it
that he was most power
when he was most humble
just
ful.
for
To
it
the very
was by
end
this
Hegelian interaction obtained,
he achieved the ultimate pur-
his death that
pose of his life. His death was, indeed, a singular fulfillment, coming at a time when he felt his own people drift
ing away from him, summoning them once more (and all
world besides)
the
To
what
to
one moment of salutary awe.
what, then, are
shall
we
we
to assign the
attribute the
phenomenon,
to
magic?
We come at last to the mystical explanation as the only
one that
fits
the case. It
known and beyond
God,
as Christians call
Otherwise the
life
fits
because
that the
it, is
it
presupposes the un
The grace of
the only tenable hypothesis.
unknowable.
of Gandhi, even
though
in every fact, has no historic intelligibility.
have been in his discrete genius a
pulse from the
horizontal in
more than
common
its
others
fully
proved
There must
general component, a
a
force
both vertical and
pulse,
thrust, so that
and hear a voice
he could communicate
that others do not hear.
He
did actually hear an "inner voice" throughout the
greater part of his life (just as Socrates did), and though
he was an exceedingly practical man who never discussed
mysteries
if
he could help
it,
there
is
no doubt
in
my own
mind
is,
that the essence of his effective being, effective, that
upon mankind, was and always will be a mystery.
He was born in one of those very small princely states
which used to make a patchwork in the west of India,
above Bombay. His own state was Porbandar, of which
his father was Prime Minister as his grandfather had been
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MAHATMA GANDHI
6
before that. His family belonged to the merchant caste
( Bania ) and to the Vaishnava side of the Hindu religion.
The Vaishnava, worshipping Vishnu in various aspects,
though not exclusively, have been increasingly numerous
and various doctrines
and divine grace have arisen among
them
not in response to any Christian influence, so far
as is known, but
by internal development. These ideas do
in India since the sixteenth century,
of sin, redemption,
not find expression in the other great school of Hinduism,
chiefly Shiva.
which worships
In Porbandar, where the Gandhi
family lived, there
were a good many members of the Jaina sect, those who
refuse to take any life under
any circumstances. Jains were
visitors
and
frequent
lifelong friends of the family, and it
is no doubt
true
that they all felt the influence of
quite
Even so, Gandhi claimed to be an orthodox
Hindu throughout his long life, and
although many of
Jaina beliefs.
and the like) disturbed the
Hinduism is large enough to contain almost
any
variation, and his claim to
orthodoxy was never
his
interpretations (as to caste
pundits,
seriously
contested.
His parents were devout Indeed, and he
always
tributed the steadfastness of his behavior, in such matters
at"
as
vows and disciplines, to the
power of examples always
him in his childhood. Most of all his mother and
before
his nurse,
pious
exerted this
Hindu women
of their rather strict sect,
power and were never forgotten. His mother,
for
example, sometimes fasted when the sun did not shine,
obedience to some vow taken
perhaps years before.
The children used to watch
anxiousy on cloudy days for
the first
ray of sunshine, so as to run shouting to her that
she could now eat.
in
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi,
the future
Mahatma,
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
7
Porbandar on October 2, 1869. He was the
of Karamchand Gandhi, known as Kaba,
son
youngest
who was Prime Minister at various times in no less than
three of those little Kathiawar states
Porbandar, Rajkot,
and Vankaner. Kaba Gandhi s father and one of his
was born
brothers
at
had held
similar positions.
They were
not quite
such exalted positions as the words might indicate, for
these
were small
lated
much
states,
wealth. But
recollection,
dealing with
and none of the family accumu
Kaba Gandhi was, by his son s
an extremely able
all
man in the
practical sense,
the intricate clan questions and disputes
He was
that arose in his jurisdiction.
and took to reading the Qita
a great temple-goer
his life,
toward the end of
the family worship.
repeating some verses every day in
This, too, must have had a formative effect on young
Gandhi s mind.
But on the whole
ing to his
own
boy was not remarkable; accord
showed no great
was extremely shy through his
the
testimony, at any rate, he
He
aptitude for study.
he tells us that he
early years and afraid of companions;
used to run to and from school to avoid having to talk to
anybody.
One
episode of his childhood seems to have
it was a
performance he saw by
the
of
dramatic
a traveling
play Harishchandra,
company
based on a great story in the Mahabharata epic. It nar
made
a great impression:
rates the sufferings of a
king of old
who
sacrificed every
thing for the truth and went through almost endless or
deals before his redemption. Only a few days before his
death,
Gandhi
told
me
this story
himself at considerable
it
length; once a thing like that entered his consciousness
could not be dislodged. As a child he used to act out
Harishchandra to himself, as he said, "times without num
ber."
The
idea of the truth as supreme
good was thus
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MAHATMA GANDHI
8
and seems to have grown as naturally
early implanted,
in him as a tree or a flower. It was to become, in time, a
and almost a single idea governing every region
central
of his thought.
He
at the
was married, by family arrangement,
age of
Kasturbai, was extreme,
His delight in his bride,
he regarded this premature sensuality
with sorrow and shame. It may have contributed to his
which he regarded in his
strong views on child marriage,
thirteen.
and
in later years
India. At that time it
maturity as one of the great evils of
not only was legal, but was valued among Hindus as a
the world. In the time
salutary protection against
place these arranged matches
unknown
and
between children previously
to each other were universal, and it has often
been remarked that happy marriages were usually the
suit. It was so, in any case, with Gandhi, and
although
re"
his conscience in later years troubled
found Kasturbai the solace of
The boy Gandhi was
him
he
greatly,
long as she lived.
possessive, and, as he
his life so
lustful,
unreasonably jealous. The customs of the period
allowed him to meet Kasturbai only at night during the
ttlls us,
half year that she
spent in the Gandhi household; the
other half of the year she spent with her
parents.
wanted to teach her everything he knew, since she was
He
illiterate,
but
"lustful love,"
as
he called
it,
gave him no
time to do so, and Kasturbai remained without
instruc"
tion
beyond simple letters in the local language, GujaratL
His regrets and self-condemnation are
in his
quite
explicit
autobiography.
He,
of his
of course, continued into
high school, regardless
he
marriage: "Only in our present Hindu
society,"
said,
"do
studies
and marriage go thus hand
in
hand."
He
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
had
9
with study, but
his difficulties
after his fourteenth
made much better progress, actually
two along the way. In his own account of these years he makes much of a regrettable epi
sode involving an older boy who was addicted to eating
year seems to have
winning a prize or
meat and drinking wine
in secret.
The
older boy, originally a friend of Gandhi s brother,
held that India s troubles would be solved if the Hindus
took to eating meat.
He
used to quote a bit of doggerel
to this effect:
Behold the mighty Englishman:
He rules the Indian small,
Because, being a meat
eater,
He is five cubits tall.
The
himself,
older
boy could
reinforce his argument by being,
stronger than Gandhi, able to run and
exhibit his muscles. Young Gandhi resolved
much
jump and
to try meat-eating out of a mixture of motives
to make
himself stronger; to see Indians grow stronger; to get
meat eating
casion the
started as a sort of
two boys repaired
"reform."
On
the
first
oc"
to a lonely spot
by the river
made Gandhi sick,
and attacked a piece of goat s meat. It
and that night he had nightmares of a goat kicking in his
stomach. Later on, for about a year, more delicate prepa
rations of meat were made from time to time by the older
friend, and Gandhi actually learned to like them. The
feasts were few and far between, he says, because the
boys had no money.
because he regarded
inevitably led
The same
him
He
it
finally
as
gave up meat-eating, not
in itself, but because it
wrong
into telling lies to his pious parents.
young Gandhi to a
older friend also took
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MAHATMA GANDHI
io
brothel, but there his shyness protected
mercy/* he
infinite
He was
says,
never in his
life
him
("God
in
His
me
"protected
against myself").
unfaithful to Kasturbai.
These misdemeanors culminated
in a fling at
cigarette"
smoking, for which Gandhi pilfered some coppers from
home and also a chip of gold off his elder brother s arm"
band. This time Gandhi
s
conscience revolted at
last.
He
wrote out a complete confession and submitted it to
his father with a
request to be punished. This was accom"
a
panied by
pledge never to steal anything again. His
father s
suffering and tears remained in his memory ever
afterwards.
Such boyish misdeeds may seem slight indeed in West"
ern eyes. They had enormous
importance in a pious
Vaishnava family. The Jaina influence, as has been said,
made the Gandhi family even more
rigid in observance
than some others
might have been, and the eating of flesh
was regarded by them all with abhorrence. The
cigarette"
smoking was not in itself of any great importance, but to
steal
coppers and tell lies in order to smoke was much
worse.
The
curred
which he
calls
when Kaba Gandhi
died.
final sin,
his father s nurse,
In^his jllness.
At
"my
double
shame,"
oc""
Young Gandhi had been
rubbing his legs and attending on him
same time he was much
preoccupied
the
with
"lustful love," as Kasturbai was
in the house.
night be went from his father s sickbed to his own
One
bed"
room and woke Kasturbai
up. She was then pregnant,
and his very keen remorse was
partly due to this. While
he was with Kasturbai a servant knocked
on the door to
tell
him
The
that his father
was dead.
was born to Kasturbai lived
only three
Gandhi s sorrow over the whole
child that
or four
days.
episode
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n
BEFORE THE BATTLE
was deep and remained with him even when he came
write of
it
many
years
to
later,
3
Hindu
To
students seldom
went overseas
in the
i88o
s.
do
so meant, as a rule, expulsion from one s caste,
with foreigners, eating foreign food, and
association
for
various
and complicated contaminations were
enduring
unavoidable on such journeys. This is all thoroughly out
of date now, and seems to a modern Indian as remote as
Middle Ages to us, but it was still the state of opinion
Gandhi s youth. Those who had gone to England and
returned to India were thought to be lost to their own re-*
were
bad as foreigners" because they
ligion. They
wore foreign clothing, indecent because it outlined the
the
in
"as
human body, and because they frequently
The point of view of that day is lost
now. Hardly anybody in India can remember when
elements of the
ate foreign food.
were thought indecent; nobody objects nowa*
days to the smoking of cigars or cigarettes; even meat
trousers
eating is
dians are
condoned on a wide
still
scale,
although most
vegetarians. In the 1880*5 the
went abroad and came back
In"
Hindus who
to their profitable
enter"
merchants (and the
risters predominated) were looked upon as renegades
and, in fact, as contaminated.
prises as barristers, doctors, or
The
When
way
bar"
notion of contamination
Gandhi was young
as vital as
it
is still
was
not lost in India.
vital in its ghostlike
any ghost can be. The shadow of an
untouchable falling across any part of the body of a caste
Hindu was a contamination and required of that caste
Hindu
a process of ceremonial purification. This
true with
some
elderly and devout people.
is still
A caste Hindu
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12
MAHATMA GANDHI
could accept milk from an untouchable, but not water.
In the very lowest castes the process of discrimination
one sub
obtained, so that even among the untouchables
division could perform one task but not another. The al
most incredible divisions of labor into which the original
caste system proliferated may have been due in part to
the excessive population or the general poverty, but it
resulted in a complicated series of discriminations that
have since been gradually and naturally disappearing.
Gandhi was not afraid of any of this. When his fam
old friend and adviser Mavji Dave, a Brahmin who
ily s
had been a lifelong friend of the dead father, advised
at the pros
study in England, the young Gandhi leaped
His
first idea was that he might study medicine, but
pea.
the Brahmin adviser was against it. Medicine was con
that is, Western medicine, with
trary to the old religion
its insistence on dissection of the body s organs
but,
more important, a medical doctor could never be prime
minister of a state. The Brahmin adviser wanted the
young Gandhi to be a prime minister, like his father,
uncle, and grandfather, and for this position a knowledge
of the law was most important. The earlier Gandhis had
been almost illiterate, but had ruled because they had
known their clans and castes and personalities. Young
Gandhi was to succeed to their functions by means of the
new weapons to be obtained in England, by admission
to the bar. As he was eighteen and still
continuing his
studies (whereas his brothers had forsaken them), the
family adviser thought the youngest son should go to
England and study law.
So he did. It was not easy. The objections to vanquish
were many from the clan and caste, from the uncle,
from the mother. The mother, a simple and devout
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
woman, was not
13
afraid of the
ocean
in particular, or of
what she had heard
the far places, but she dreaded
of
women, wine, and
When
she had
any of
meat-eating in foreign lands.
the firm vow of her son to abstain from
these habits, she reluctantly and sorrowfully consented.
He took his vows before a Jaina monk who had once
been a Hindu of his own caste, and this satisfied the
mother
s
objections.
But on
difficulties,
The vows were
his arrival in
and was
own
read out of his
fraction of the
Bombay he
never violated.
more caste
some debate, solemnly
was the Modh Bania, a
ran into
in fact, after
caste.
(It
Bania fraction of the Vaishya. )
No
mem"
ber of his caste had ever gone overseas before, and in a
solemn meeting
laminated.
He
it
was declared
accepted
this
that he
without
would be
He remained
more
surprising, so did his elder brother.
outcaste to the end, though as a "holy man"
is
con"
difficulty, and, what
he was (by
Indian definitions) exempt from all caste rules or regu
lations. He never
again observed any of the caste rules,
such as the wearing and manipulation of the "sacred
a symbolical cord, or the various
shavings and
net-shavings which were part of the ritual. In his own
mind he was truly outcaste, and chose to remain so.
thread,"
He was only eighteen, a shy and eager Hindu boy
with ears stuck out almost at right angles from his head,
when he sailed from Bombay on September 4, 1889.
He had new European clothing, purchased through the
offices of his brother and friends. The necktie, which was
become
him in London, was
was acutely conscious of his short
jacket and trousers. Shoes were unpleasant. But he was
equipped for the great journey and alive with anxiety to
to
a source of pleasure to
then a torture.
He
learn, to acquire the instruments of victory.
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MAHATMA GANDHI
I4
All instruction in India above the
first
four classes of
was then, as now, conducted in Eng
elementary school
with the English
lish. Thus Gandhi had an acquaintance
it was a
to
went
ever
he
England. But
language before
of the mother or the
not the
school-language,
market, and it did not
language
come
him.
naturally to
On the ship
what anybody, even the
difficulty understanding
of violating his vows
stewards, said to him. He was afraid
women, and meat and consequently ate all
against wine,
from food he had brought
his meals in his cabin,
he had
chiefly
of the knife or
poor boy knew nothing
to any
of
afraid
was
he
that
speaking
fork, and was so shy
cloth
best
his
saved
had
he
Moreover,
fellow
with him.
The
passenger.
ing,
which was white
flannels, for his landing at
ampton (having worn black
all
the
way
South
to
England)
English autumn
and consequently landed in the grisly
weather most unsuitably dressed. This was his chief anxi
until he could obtain his scanty bag
ety for two days,
He wept at night for a long time, strange and alone,
gage.
uncertain of every step, fearful of violating his vows un
some other Indian sin in an
wittingly or of committing
English climate.
The
first
problem was, of course, food.
It
does not
much any more to Indian students. It did not
matter much even then to a great many of them. They
ate what the country provided and got used to it. But
Gandhi had taken the vegetarian vow, which he was de
matter so
termined to observe or die.
He
could not eat the sodden,
savorless substances that constituted the English idea of
recorded that in the early weeks he
vegetables. He has
almost starved. Oatmeal porridge in the morning was a
help, but at other meals
<io.
The
it
was
difficult to
Indian student friends
know what
among whom
to
he found
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
15
who had found a boarding house for him
himself
were incensed. They had no difficulty eating meat and
thought Gandhi both foolish and obstinate in his insist"
ence upon his vegetarian vow. From one boarding-house
he took his weary way, never getting his fill,
one day he hit upon a vegetarian restaurant in Far
ingdon Street. "God had come to my aid," he said. He
found in that restaurant, where he at last had a hearty
to another
until
meal, a copy of a book called A Plea for Vegetarianism,
which he bought for a shilling and took with him. He
that is, con
read it over and over and it converted him
verted him from being a vegetarian by inheritance and by
vows taken to the mother, a matter of religion and
tradi"
tion, into a vegetarian convinced of the rightness of his
cause. As usual in his long life, he had found something
to support
lieved.
He
him in what he already was and already be
had found "authority." He could now be a
on a theoretical basis.
vegetarian
It is curious and, of course,
funny that Mahatma Can-*
dhi was forever in search of "authority" for his few,
simple,
and sovereign
idea>
Once he
said to an inter
viewer: "Everything I have to say is as old as the hills."
This was true, except that the circumstances and SUP
roundings of the saying made a great difference. And yet,
old as his ideas were, he sometimes took many long years
to find out that something he intimately felt and believed,
with all the power of his intense being, was felt and be*
lieved by others or had been felt and believed by others
before him. This kind of discovery, recurrent not often
(because the ideas were few) but powerfully, made
every great turning-point of his lifeJHis vegetarianism
was
as natural, as inborn, as
anything could be in a human
being, and yet a few books and pamphlets by English
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MAHATMA GANDHI
l6
proselytists
the strength
as "cranks") gave him
(known, of course,
was could be justified
he
to see that what
the entire life of
rationally. In this respect
Gandhi
is
a
what he already was, of becoming
story of becoming
these external but
himself. He was It, but he required
or might be right.
was
he
that
himself
tresses to assure
at the end, must have been
His humility, overwhelming
so heavily upon these
innate or he could not have relied
It was so in all the
accidental aids from the beginning.
or Ruskin or Thodiscoveries, with Tolstoy
subsequent
"author
in turn came to support with
reau
they each
and had
believed
that which he
already passionately
to the limit of his powers. It was so
already acted upon
Testament, which in
the
even with
Qita and the
words
soul
his
into
corresponding to
themselves
cised
bj
ity"
New
the realities already existent there.
The vegetarian battle occupied a good deal of his
it was im
time in London. His Indian friends thought
of him to insist on food contrary
proper and embarrassing
tenderhearted
to the surrounding customs. He tried, in his
way,
to
make
it
up
to
them by being
as elegant as
pos
customs as his purse and
sible, as conformable to English
would allow: he bought evening clothes,
temperament
took dancing lessons, tried to learn the violin, and made
as
in general an attempt to "play the English gentleman,"
these
in
months
he said. He seems to have spent several
to make up by social graces
preoccupations, endeavoring
he clung to his vows to his
which
with
for the obstinacy
mother. In the end he surrendered all that, suddenly and
himself to his studies for the bar.
completely, to devote
The photographs of Gandhi taken at this age (and
the little Hindu
published by him ) are extremely funny
ears at right angles, the piercing eyes and meager
with
boy
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BEFORE THE BATTLE
17
and pomaded hair. He was prob"
even
then
of how funny the whole enter*
conscious
ably
never
There
was
was.
any time in his life when he
prise
could not and did not laugh at himself. Indeed, laughter,
of a gentle and innocent kind, usually at his own expense,
was a necessity to him. Even two days before his death
he made little jokes to me, and his oldest and most de
voted friends, such as Sarojini Naidu and Jawaharlal
Nehru, had as many funny things as solemn ones to tell
of him. Mrs. Naidu s stories show that throughout their
face, the stiff
high collar
long relationship the salutary virtue of the laugh sustained
them both, even through anguished
times.
4
Gandhi
England were fruitful in many
agonies were over he learned how to
life and work in an
enjoy
English climate and on English
terms. Vegetarianism was a help in unexpected ways; he
joined the Vegetarian Society, became a member of its
executive committee, and had his first experience in or
s
three years in
ways. After his
first
ganization, though shyness made him unable to speak at
the one occasion when he felt impelled to
try, somebody else had to read his paper for him. And
meetings.
On
yet with the vegetarians he formed friendships and
acquaintances, just as he did among the students.
His
first
experiments with clothing, food, and
made
Eng"
suddenly lost their interest for him when he de*
cided that he had come to London to study and had done
lish life
little
in that direction.
Admission to the bar was easy
much
study was required, the examinations
was automatic
to the
were simple, and the
c
of
terms"
if the student had
them),
(twelve
equiva
*kept
lent to about three years. Gandhi therefore made up his
enough: not
"call
bar"
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x
MAHATMA GANDHI
g
mind
to
London
for the
work
matriculation examination,
six
and spent a whole year on it. It was given every
first
the
for
to
left
five
prepare
months, and he had only
of insufficient Latin. He
one, in which he failed because
later with (ex
took the examinations again six months
The second time he passed
different
subjects.
cept Latin)
with
The
hard
its
work-
unnecessary
episode,
sense that nobody expected him to
the
in
unnecessary
and with its excellent results, useful to
it
in
all.
undertake
him
in
^
many
respects
dhi even at that age.
later on,
was
characteristic of
Gan
read for the first time
England that he
Testament. Two
New
the
and
both the Bhagawd-Qita
introduced him
and
brothers,
Englishmen, theosophists
whom he met in a
Another
to the
Also
it
was
in
Englishman,
induced him to read the Bible.
Qita.
vegetarian boarding-house,
He
found
it
ment, but the
first
"went
known
it
with the Qita, profoundly impressed
to
straight
It seems a
for
New
acquaintance
him
Testa"
through the Old
his
after
soon
Testament, coming so
to get
impossible
little
my
odd
heart/*
that
he
says.
Gandhi should not have
the Qita in either Sanskrit or his native Gujarati,
must have been familiar to his father in both lan
He read it first with his English theosophist
guages.
Wends
in the English metrical translation of Sir
Edwin
Arnold (The Song Celestial ), which remained to the
end his favorite translation of the great poem. The revelation must have been, at the very beginning, supremely
he found in the Qita exactly what he needed
personal:
for the expression of
what he felt in the recesses of his
The advice
however
obscurely, to be the truth.
being,
of the Lord Shri Krishna to the hero Arjuna on the eve
of the great battle is, indeed, a kind of crystallization of
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